#ordinary

This week I learned a very important lesson from Elijah, the Hebrew prophet. In 1 Kings 19, The evil queen Jezebel threatens to kill him: “I will make your life as the life of one of them by this time tomorrow!” So instead of celebrating God’s great victory just moments before over the prophets of Baal, he runs away and waits under a little tree in the desert for death.

When I first read that, it wasn’t the threat of death that stood out to me as a reason to flee- it was the chance of being made like everyone else. Oh, how I have worried about being ordinary! For me, obscurity *is* death. To live a life without purpose, meaning, calling, or point seems, well, pretty pointless. I have huge, gigantic dreams, but I also have heavy, dark, paralyzingly fears of inadequacy. So I run and I hide within my responsibilities, my activities, and my hobbies, trying ignore the ever increasing tension in my heart between “called” and “not good enough.”

Unlike Elijah, who thought he was the last true follower of God left, I don’t think I’m alone under this tree.

But the Lord still sees me, and you, under our own little bushes of busyness. And he loves us, so he sends his angels to shake us awake and tell us to eat the bread and the water. The key to being extraordinary is not a formula, or a proposal or a platform. It’s “take and eat!” Eat the Bread of Life, drink the Living Water.

Abiding with Him sure seemed to change Elijah: “he arose and ate and drank, and went in the strength of that food forty days and forty nights to Mount Horeb, the mountain of God.”

Forty days and forty nights???
That’s extraordinary.