So, someone starving goes and asks another starving person for bread. Reluctantly, she gives it to him. This is the 1 Kings passage from Sunday’s lectionary. Here we see the fellowship of the desperate (which in some ways resembles many of Jesus’ first followers – people in need of something). Under God’s guidance – and part of the mainstream of the salvation-story – , it all works out and both are fed. I have to say, I wouldn’t always be so confident things would work out – and the experience of people in desperate circumstances is often more like the fight for the bent halfpenny. Elijah was a prophet, and the woman who gives him the bread is a foreign widow. God has co-opted an outsider into the things that God is doing. There’s a few things here that we might say offer guidance for what to do in our twenty first century lives, but I’m not so sure there’s very much of a direct translation.
Maybe it’s just a piece of narrative that says God is amazing and might very well surprise us.
A muted morning on the Trail today, with soft clouds and some faint mist about. Sometimes it’s just good to listen. Behind me I heard a pigeon flapping into motion, followed by a cascade of fog drips from the trees. Every so often along the Trail, the sound of a little torrent was very obvious (some streams were visible, some not). There has been quite a lot of rain over the last few days.