In today’s first reading, 1 Kings 19: 9a, 11-16, Elijah is fleeing
for his life! God finds him hiding in a cave at Mt. Horeb and tells
him to come out of the cave and “stand on the mountain before the Lord,” as God
“will be passing by.”
Elijah comes out of the cave, as God asks of him and waits
for the Lord to pass by. Hurricane or
tornado-like winds pass by, “rending the
mountains and crushing rocks before the Lord.”
The earth quakes, shaking it to
its very foundations. A fire erupts. God is in none of those terrifying
disasters. Following these scary events,
everything becomes calm. In the quiet, Elijah hears a “tiny whispering sound. When he
heard this, Elijah hid his face in his cloak and went and stood at the entrance
of the cave.
Note, that it is when the storm subsided, that Elijah hears
God’s voice. God wants to know why Elijah is in hiding and from what is he
fleeing. Elijah answers the Lord: “I have been most zealous for [you]
Lord, the God of hosts. But the children of Israel have forsaken your covenant,
torn down your altars, and put your prophets to the sword. I alone am left, and
they seek to take my life.” God responds
to Elijah: “Go, take the road back to the desert near Damascus.” He then gives
him instructions of what to do for the people of Israel, against whom he had
complained. And from whom he is fleeing for his life.
Like Elijah, we, too, have got to come out of hiding and face that from which we are fleeing. We need to come before the Lord
with our fears. We need to be honest with the Lord in prayer! And, yes, we need to become quiet in order to
hear the gentle, loving, caring voice of the Lord. The Lord cares about what is
happening in our lives, as he did for his prophet Elijah, and will
help us move on in accord with God’s holy will. As in the case of Elijah, God’s will is not
that we be destroyed by the disasters around us or within us. Neither does God want us to withdraw from
life. “Go, take the road back to the
desert,” God says to us, as He did to Elijah.
In the desert, unlike our expectations, we will, with God’s help, find
or create new life, discover or create new
opportunities. Why? Because, it is when we are powerless that we are strong in
the Lord . It is when we are at our lowest that we realize our dependence upon the Lord and
that, apart from God, we can do nothing (compare Jn 15:5)!
No comments:
Post a Comment