In the quiet stillness of the cool morning, I sat down with my journal. As I pondered this scripture and the prophet Elijah, I considered where he was at this very moment when these ancient words were written; he was trembling with fear; his hope had been shattered; he was worn out from running for his life from Jezebel, who sought to kill him, and he was discouraged. As I unpacked this story, I thought about all of these emotions that this extraordinary man experienced and I understood he was an ordinary person, just like me. Fear is a natural emotion, but when fear moves to dread, it can be paralyzing, all consuming, and it magnifies the unknown to the point of taunting me. When I have no hope, I have no vision for my future; I am crushed in a heap of ruin and I am defeated and broken by the traumatic events that have occurred in my life. Being weary depletes me of my strength, my energy, my endurance, and it beats me down to the point of being worn out and exhausted. Discouragement has a tendency to select its own facts; it causes me to focus on the situation at hand; it robs me of being able to see anything good in my circumstances, and it nurses my own sense of self-pity.
1 Kings 19:9 says, “There he went into a cave and spent the night. And the word of the LORD came to him: ‘What are you doing here, Elijah?’” The Bible is filled with saints who faced difficult situations and treacherous circumstances; some of them handled them very well and some of them did not. What I noticed about Elijah, about David and Moses, is that each one of them retreated to a quiet place, a place where they could be alone with their God, a place where the Lord was able to speak to them in their discouragement, a place of refreshment and a place of reflection. In God’s wisdom, He asked Elijah, “What are you doing here?” God can speak to us anywhere at any time, but what I notice about these great prophets, is that each of them retreated in order to get away from it all and with the full expectation of hearing from the Lord. We live in a busy and noisy world and I have found that I need to meet with the Lord daily in a place that lends itself to silence, a place where no one else is present, a place where I can hear my Savior speak to me early in the morning, in the quietness of day where I can gather all my emotions and lay them all down at the foot of the cross.
When you lay your head down on your pillow at night and it’s just you and your thoughts, where do these thoughts take you? When you wake in the early morning hours thinking about the great and powerful whirlwinds of events that have torn through your life and there is nowhere to go, what do you do? When your life has been shattered and broken as a result of a traumatic loss or your world shaken by devastating news, where do you hide? When the destruction of an all-consuming fire has burned through everything in its path, has destroyed all that you hold dear and all that is left are the embers of the ashes that threaten to reignite a flame you thought had long been extinguished, how can you sleep? What I have found is that when I stop and retreat and consider Jesus, when I look up from my sorrow, from my pain, from my fear and my discouragement and fix my eyes on my Lord and my Savior, I can hear His still small voice speaking words of peace and comfort into my empty and thirsty soul. I can hear His gentle whisper filling me with songs of deliverance. I can feel His love for me and He is there with me in the quietness of the moment in the midst of the holy silence, in the stillness of my heart. He is near and I know that He is God.
