Bible Reading: 1 Kings 19:1-14
Do you sometimes think about someone and have some particular expectations of them, to the extent that you feel disappointed when it’s not met? Like you think of some very rich person and expect them to have a good dress sense, and so you feel disappointed when they don’t match their Colours well; or how you expect some very handsome guy in your class that you had been crushing to be very intelligent and so you feel disappointed when you check his scores and see he failed; or you feel disappointed when you have some astounding and oratory world leader having issues in his marriage…
What would have been your expectations of Elijah?
Elijah is definitely a stand-out in his generation, and in many generations! He was endued with such supernatural power and anointing that heralded him in a very special way.
When you think of Elijah and all that God was doing in and through him, you would expect him to constantly be in the frontlines , boldly confronting everything contrary to God, demonstrating the power of God in very headline-making ways, and so on.
In our reading today, we see Elijah running away from the threats of Jezebel and then running into a cave to hide.
Not you, Elijah!
Maybe more than Elijah many years ago, we all have that tendency- almost like a millipede- to recoil and cave in when we feel hit.
What have you heard or been hit by that has made you cave in?
Was your trust broken and you’ve decided you can never trust again? Did your background make you get familiar with a cave of insecurity and fear? Has a sense of need that you’ve become familiar with made you totally unsure of yourself? Have you build ‘hideouts’ for yourself from reality- addictions and habits and all that? Have you somehow began to bury yourself in work as an escape from your relationship failures? Is depression or some painful memory making you run into a cave and shut out the world and all the possibilities? Or is it even just the everyday sense of feeling overwhelmed by life that gets you caving in?
Are you living like the millipede?
Today, I pray we can be challenged and propelled to rediscover the audacious and opened out life that God made us for!
If you would hear the words God spoke to Elijah when he met him hiding in the cave “What are you doing here, Elijah?” (1 Kings 19:13)
I believe it’s the very same voice of God that comes to us in a world that has a way of making us cave in.
What are you doing here?!
I believe the grace and calling of God on the lives of His children is for a lot more than a life caving into the cave; we are called to be on the frontline of the purpose and move of God in a time like this!
Would you take a moment today to reflect on ways that life may have hit you and made you play the millipede and ask the Lord to help you Rediscover the beauty of the full opened out life He calls you to!