Elijah and Legos

Part Two

1 Kings 17:7-24

Reflection

Welcome back for part two of Elijah and Legos!  If you read part one, I took a stroll down memory lane and shared how much I enjoyed Legos as a child and now again with my own children.  If you haven’t read part one, I used Legos as a metaphor for our journey as disciples of Jesus.  Now, I don’t know about your house, but when we build Legos in our house, there is a lot of preparation that goes into getting set up.  First, we make sure the kitchen table is completely cleared off.  Then, we make sure we have at least one baking sheet and a variety of bowl sizes.  Then, we remove the factory-sorted and numbered bags of Legos from the box.  Each bag goes in its own bowl.  Next, we get the instruction manual out and familiarize ourselves with the first few pages, and then the build begins!  Fortunately, most Legos don’t require a degree in Rocket Surgery or Brain Science!  However, like anything in life, proper preparation can make a huge difference.

 Application

This was true for Elijah as well, and it’s true for any Christian.  None of us are likely to become prophets.  We will, however, if not already, become spouses, parents, colleagues, managers, coaches, students, teachers, doctors, or one of countless other roles of importance.  Much like the line from the movie Spiderman, “With great power comes great responsibility,” as disciples of Jesus, great responsibility requires great preparation.  Even King David, a man after God’s own heart (Acts 13:22), had to be in a season of preparation of nearly twenty years between his anointing by Samuel and when he became king.  Part of God’s preparation in all our lives is His process of refining us,  like a silversmith who leaves the silver ore in the hottest part of the flame to burn out all the impurities, knowing that the process is finished when they can see their reflection in the molten silver. While God works to refine us during seasons of preparation, sometimes He has a way of preparing us through on-the-job training!  It would be like this for Elijah when he would have to confront the false prophets of Baal (1 Kings 18:16-40).  It was like this for the Disciples when Jesus sent them out in pairs to heal the sick and told them not to take any provisions with them (Luke 10).  Sometimes, preparation is needed to simply help us learn that “faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.” (Heb 11:1).

 God had a plan for Elijah’s life, for David’s life, for Moses’s life, for Paul’s life, and God has a plan for your life too!  My son, who is nine, asks me all the time about what heaven is like.  He wants to know if everyone drives a Tesla, whether he can have ice cream whenever he wants, or if he can play any video game ever made, along with all the other important things a 9-year-old worries about!  It doesn’t matter what his question might be; I always tell him that heaven is going to be more amazing than we can even imagine.  The same can be said about God’s plan for your life.  It is going to be a thousand times more amazing than you can even imagine! 

 “I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “Plans to prosper you  and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” Jeremiah 29:11

 You are not Elijah.  I am not Elijah.  Only Elijah was Elijah.  The God we serve though, will go to the same great lengths in preparing us for what He has in mind for us, just as He did for Elijah. 

 As God prepares us, sometimes we must have wilderness-type experiences like Elijah's in the Kerith Ravine. Moses, Joseph, Elijah, Paul, and Jesus all had wilderness moments in their lives. While a journey into the physical wilderness is perhaps the easiest to recognize, these times of isolation can exist within the hearts, souls, and minds of Christians. These wilderness phases of our preparation can often feel like God is silent or that He has hidden his face from us. 

 “Truly, you are a God who hides himself, O God of Israel, the Savior.” -Isaiah 45:15

 This time for Elijah in the wilderness could have been a time of deep soul-searching.  It can be so easy to allow the cycle of self-doubt and the negative feedback loop of our minds to begin to take over.  We begin to question the decisions that got us to this place of being isolated and alone and begin to wonder why God even let us get to this place.  My personal wilderness over these past twenty-one months has been learning to live as an above-knee amputee.  Losing my leg to blood clots at forty-four, learning how to walk again with a prosthesis at forty-five, and now learning to adapt to life as an amputee at forty-six was certainly not part of any script I could have written.  Yet, it has been in this desert or wilderness these past twenty-one months that God has done some of his best and hardest work on me.  He has taught me to rely on Him, his plan and provision, and to fully surrender to what His plan is for my life.  Much like a master woodworker, he has been methodically using His bench plane to slowly strip layer after layer of worldly varnish and paint away and take me down to the fine wood grain He has always known is below those layers.  Is He there yet?  Definitely not!  Through these twenty-one months, though, the words of Job and then Paul stand out:

“Though he slay me, yet will I hope in him.” -Job 13:15

 “…so that no one would be unsettled by these trials.  For you know quite well that we are destined for them.”-1
Thessalonians 3:3 

So, what is God preparing you for?  Are you in a wilderness or a desert currently?  Does God seem silent or absent? 

 I challenge you and encourage you to seek out some solitude or extra time for prayer with God this weekend.  Just be with God.  Listen to what the Holy Spirit might be saying to your heart.  Let God reveal to you how He wants to prepare you for something greater!  No matter how hard the road might be to get there, rest in God’s promise that “I will never leave you nor forsake you.(Hebrews 13:5)

 In Christ,

Doug