Hard Moments

After Elijah announced to Ahab, the King, that there was going to be a drought with the words, "As the Lord the God of Israel lives, before whom I stand, there shall be neither dew nor rain these years, except by my word," (I Kings 17:1), he went as he was told to the Wadi Cherith where he was fed by the ravens and drank from the wadi.  (A wadi is a dry river bed in a valley that is filled by rain.)  With no rain the wadi was bound to become hard dry dirt which it did and Elijah the man who did what God told him to do was without water.    

It might have been a hard moment for Elijah to embrace.  Perhaps, he figured the stream would not run dry since he was doing what God had told him to do. He had taken great risk in telling the King a drought was coming and the prophet might have thought that somehow he would receive some special provision for his faithfulness.  It is, of course, a temptation many of us find staring at us.  When some tragedy overcomes the comfort of our routine living, we are apt to whine to God.  We might hear ourselves telling Him we deserve better since we are one of the faithful ones.   Unfortunately, there are no exemptions.  Embedded in the Sermon on the Mount are those words of Jesus which tell us, "...He (the Father in Heaven) makes His sun rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous."  (Matthew 5:45).  

To expect some kind of exemption from difficulty as a reward for faithfulness means we are going to live with frustration and disappointment.  The disciples with the exception of John died the death of a martyr and Jesus, the very Son of God, suffered and died a horrible death on a cross.  While our questions will always grab hold of us as we go through some of the hard times of life, what we do come to know through the experience of going through a few of them is that God is not absent, nor is He uncaring, but out there in what seems to be uncontrollable chaos working to bring us through what we cannot pass alone.