Spending the week with my young grandchildren and their parents, I remembered the joys and the challenges of parenting. There are many times in our lives when we feel we are going it alone and parenting seems to be one of them. You might feel like you are the only one when you think it will take a miracle when you or a loved one is sick and it seems like there is no hope. Or we look around the church or our community and know that change is needed but we feel hopelessly immobilized or that we are the only one with a good idea. Today’s story from 1 Kings, suggests that to find God in our aloneness, we must be quiet enough to listen.

Elijah had been a faithful prophet, in fact, Elijah was not afraid to confront those in charge, namely Ahab, the King of Israel, and Jezebel, his wife, who had established the worship of Baal as the national religion.

Elijah challenged Ahab to a showdown on top of Mount Carmel between God and Baal to prove which one was the true God. The gods of Baal failed the test. In dramatic fashion, God consumed the sacrifice even after Elijah had the Hebrew people douse the altar with water three times. Today’s reading begins when Jezebel sent Elijah word that she was going to have him killed as a result.

Elijah runs for his life. He walks for a day into the wilderness and lays down under a broom tree. Elijah feels like he can’t go on and asks God to take his life. In this passage, Elijah shows his fear, his aloneness, and his feeling of worthlessness. He fell asleep and was awakened by an angel that provided food and water. Twice this happened. A second time, the angel touched him and said, “Get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much for you.”

Notice how God prepares Elijah for the journey ahead that he doesn’t foresee. Elijah got up, ate and drank and went in the strength of that food forty days and forty nights to Mt. Horeb, a difficult journey for people like Elijah who have lost their vision. And the journey we might take at two in the morning when we are alone with our fears. God took care of Elijah when he had nothing left.

In the cave on Mount Horeb, God asked Elijah, “What are you doing here?”

Elijah responded that he is the only one who has been faithful, he was the only one that has done what God asked. The Israelites had forsaken God’s covenant. Now the King and Jezebel want to take his life. Notice that Elijah doesn’t really answer God’s question.

God doesn’t respond to Elijah’s defense of his own faithfulness. God instructs Elijah to go outside the cave and he will know God is passing by. Suddenly, there are powerful manifestations of wind, earthquake, and fire; ways that we might ordinarily expect God to show up. But God is in none of these.

We are familiar with “the still small voice” when in actuality the Hebrew word means God comes as “the sound of sheer silence.” God asks Elijah again, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” Elijah repeats the same argument that he alone has been serving the Lord and the Israelites have forsaken God.

God doesn’t address Elijah’s complaints about others. Again, God provides for Elijah when Elijah thought he was the only one left, the only one that was faithful.

The fact is that God has been present all along while Elijah was focused on himself. Elijah elevated his service by repeating that he alone had been the one who had not bowed to Baal, and he alone had confronted what he felt were the evil rulers leading God’s people in the wrong direction.

God challenges our thinking that we have to do it all or that we need our own solution to every problem, when we think others are not doing enough, and when we don’t get the credit, we feel we deserve. Elijah encountered his own unconscious conviction that if anything decent is going to happen, he is the only one that must make it happen.

Parker Palmer, in his book Let Your Life Speak, writes: The gift we receive on the inner journey is the knowledge that ours is not the only act in town… We learn that we need not carry the whole load but can share it with others… We learn that sometimes we are free to lay the load down altogether. The great community asks us to do only what we are able and trust the rest to other hands. Graciously God doesn’t kill Elijah, nor does he pacify him. In the verses that follow our reading, God tells him essentially to get back to work and reminds him there will be 7,000 who remain faithful to God and there will be new Kings. In other words, God reminds Elijah he is not the only one and he needs to make some plans for the future.

How do we trust God’s silence?

Dr. Craig Barnes suggests that the will of God is revealed, in this passage, “in things like the progress of generations toward a future filled with hope,” when God instructs Elijah to anoint Elisha as his successor.

Barnes continues: You have to know how to find God not just on Carmel when the drama is obvious, but also how to behold God in the quiet, ordinary, faithfulness of those around you and your own calling, and the promise of a future filled with hope… But for those who pray, for those who know about the long road up to Mount Horeb, the discovery that you’re not [the only one] is always a call to worship the God who is. And when you see that, even in the silent places, even in the ordinary places, then you have all you need to get back to work.