When is the last time that you were really, really hungry and there was no chance of your getting even a piece of bread for another day? No chance that your family would sit down to a full meal together or even have a bowl of nutritious soup. No possibility that anyone would be coming to your door with a basket of produce or a few eggs in the foreseeable future. It’s painful to even think about what it would be like to live in an area where there was a famine, isn’t it? To hear the children cry out with pangs of hunger or to watch the elderly slowly lose their capacity to resist disease or to have their energy renewed through food is an experience that no one would ever choose to have.
When Elijah, the prophet, came to the village of Zarephath, he was hungry and thirsty. Because of the evil that the kings and the people had done, God had declared that there would be a famine in Israel for a few years. During this time, Elijah had been in “Dry Brook University”*, learning that God would provide for him the sustenance that he needed through the water from the brook and the meat that the ravens brought him each day. But the time came, when the brook went dry, so God sent him on to the “Empty-Barrel Graduate School”*, a place where he would learn some lessons about faith that he couldn’t learn any other way. This grad school took place in the simple home of a widow, who willingly showed him hospitality, woman who experienced the miracles of not only God’s provision of food but of the resurrection of her son.
Are you by any chance in an undergraduate school where God is teaching you some lessons about prayer and faith, God’s timing and His ability to provide? Or are you working on your advanced degree where others are watching what it means to trust God? If you are, get ready because God is probably preparing you for some great adventures in the days ahead.
*Taken from a sermon by Ray Pritchard, www.keepbelieving.com – I Kings 17