Strange Tales, Week 3
A Guide of Sorts
Each week picks up where Sunday left off. A sermon can only hold so much, so these six mornings go back into the passage and sit with the parts we ran past. Read the short passage first, in your own Bible if you have one handy. Then read the reflection. Then pray, in these words or your own. Six days, Monday through Saturday, and then we are back together.
One thread runs under all of it. We are people who like to name things before we understand them, and skip the parts we cannot name at all. This whole series is leaning how to practice the opposite. So, every morning the hope is to keep asking, one way or another, the same two questions...
What am I trying to name before morning?
Where is God in the part of the story I usually skip?
Strange Tales, Week 3:
Monday:
“As they still went on and talked, a chariot of fire and horses of fire separated the two of them. And Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven. Elisha saw it and cried out, ‘Father, father!’... Then he took hold of his own clothes and tore them in two pieces.”
- 2 Kings 2:11-12
Look at how little space the text gives him. Elijah is taken up in verse eleven. Elisha tears his clothes in the same verse. By the next one he has picked the mantle up off the ground and is already walking toward the Jordan to see if it works. Grief and the first task of the rest of his life arrive back to back, in the same breath, with no white space between them.
We tend to read this as momentum. The story moving fast because that is how the Spirit works, urgent and forward. I want to offer a slower reading. What if the speed is the wound? What if a man who just watched the person he loved most disappear into the sky deserved one whole day where nobody needed anything from him, and the story simply does not give him one, because nobody around him thought to?
I know that rhythm in my own life. The phone call comes, and by the time you hang up you are already making the next arrangement. There is no gap scheduled in for simply standing there, having just lost something. We treat the absence of a pause as strength. Scripture, at least here, is not so sure.
What would it have looked like for someone, anyone, to have said to Elisha, before he even reached the river: not yet? Sit down first?
A Prayer for Today
God, you know how fast the next thing arrives after loss, how little room the world leaves for grief to just be grief. Where I have not been allowed to stop, or have not allowed myself to, meet me there before you ask anything else of me. Amen.
Tuesday:
“The company of prophets... said to him, ‘See now, we have fifty strong men... please let them go and seek your master.’ He responded, ‘No, do not send them.’ But when they urged him until he was ashamed, he said, ‘Send them.’ So they sent fifty men who searched for three days but did not find him.”
- 2 Kings 2:16-18
Elisha says no first. That part is easy to miss because the search happens anyway, but it is right there in the text. He knows what he saw. He does not need fifty men combing the hillsides for three days to confirm that Elijah is gone. He has already told them the truth. They do not believe him, or they cannot bear to, and they pressure him until, worn down, he lets them go looking for a man he already knows they will not find.
Three days is a long time to hold a boundary you already stated once. Three days is a long time to wait on the outcome of a search you knew was pointless before it started, because you were the only witness and nobody trusted the witness.
This is one of the quieter cruelties in the story, and one of the most familiar. Somebody tells you plainly what happened, what they need, what is true, and the people around them decide their own uncertainty matters more than that person’s word. So instead of rest, you get a three-day search party you did not ask for, dragging the loss back out into the open every single day it fails to find anything.
Where has your account of your own life been overruled by other people’s need to double-check it?
A Prayer for Today
God, give me the nerve to hold a no I have already given, and give me the humility to trust someone’s word about their own grief the first time they say it. Amen.
Wednesday:
“Now the people of the city said to Elisha, ‘The location of this city is good... but the water is bad.’ He said, ‘Bring me a new bowl, and put salt in it.’”
- 2 Kings 2:19-22
The search party comes back empty-handed. Elisha has now lost his mentor, been disbelieved, and spent three days waiting on a search he knew would fail. And the very next thing the text records is the city handing him a municipal problem. No one asks how the search went. No one asks how he is. They ask him to fix the water.
There is no threshold moment here, no scene where anyone says, welcome back, take the day. The story does not even pause to let him walk back through the gate before someone has a request ready. This is what it looks like when the world assumes your grief has an expiration date measured in days instead of weeks, and once that date passes, you are simply available again.
I know this one from the inside. Sermons still need writing the week your world tilts. Office hours do not clear themselves. The calendar does not know you just buried something. And most of the time, neither do we, because we are the ones who keep filling it back in, the same day we get home from the search that found nothing.
What is the thing sitting on your calendar right now that is assuming you have already finished grieving something you have not finished grieving?
A Prayer for Today
God, slow the calendar down long enough for me to actually come home before I am handed the next task. Teach me to notice when I am the one refusing myself that gap. Amen.
Thursday:
“Some small boys came out of the city and jeered at him, saying, ‘Go away, baldhead! Go away, baldhead!’”
- 2 Kings 2:23
The word underneath the taunt is alah, go up, the same word used a chapter earlier for Elijah’s ascension. The boys are not mocking a hairline. They are mocking a mantle. Go on, do what your master did. Get caught up in the whirlwind if you’re really who you say you are. Prove it.
That is the demand running under every single encounter Elisha has had since the river. The fifty prophets demanded proof he was telling the truth about Elijah. The city demanded proof he could actually fix what was broken. And now a crowd of kids demand proof he is worthy of a mantle nobody made him audition for in the first place, because God never asked him to earn it. He picked it up off the ground and it simply worked.
I think most of us know this particular exhaustion. Not the grief itself but the constant follow-up requirement attached to it: prove you’re handling it, prove you’re still capable, prove the promotion or the mantle or the title was deserved. Nobody with any sense would ask a person to audition for a love that has already been given. And yet we ask ourselves to, every single day, long after anyone else has stopped watching.
Who, or what, is still asking you to prove something that was never actually up for negotiation?
A Prayer for Today
God, you have never once asked me to audition for what you have already given me. Quiet the voices, including my own, that keep demanding I prove it anyway. Amen.
Friday:
“When he turned around and saw them, he cursed them in the name of the LORD. Then two she-bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the boys.”
- 2 Kings 2:24
I am not going to explain the curse away, and I am not going to defend it. It is grotesque, and the Bible reports it flatly, the way Shirley Jackson reports a stoning: no fanfare, no apology, the same tone as instructions for house-sitting. That flatness is doing something. It is hiding, in plain sight, exactly how much had already been spent before this moment arrived.
Elisha does not call the bears. He curses the boys, and God sends the bears, and that distinction matters, but it does not make the curse gentle. What it does is locate the wound correctly. This is not a man with something to spare who decides to be cruel. This is a man with nothing left, hit one more time in the one place he had already been hit a dozen times that week, who has finally got nothing kind left to give.
I know that particular bottom. Mine showed up this week as a back I have refused to let heal for years, finally sending the bill due all at once, on a day I had already given away to everyone but myself. Nobody gets hurt worse than the people closest to us when we are running on empty, and the honest thing to say is not that it is excusable. The honest thing to say is that it is what happens, reliably, when rest keeps losing to the next demand.
What comes out of you when you have nothing left, and what does that tell you about how badly you needed to stop before you got there?
A Prayer for Today
God, I know what is left in me when I have given everything else away first. Teach me to rest before I get there, not as an excuse for the curse, but so there is something besides the curse left to give. Amen.
Saturday:
“From there he went on to Mount Carmel, and then returned to Samaria.”
- 2 Kings 2:25
The very next line just keeps walking. No verdict on the bears, no lesson attached, no moment where the text stops to make sure we feel appropriately bad about it. Elisha goes on to Carmel, then to Samaria, the way a river keeps moving past a rock it just crashed against. The story does not dwell there, and neither, eventually, does he.
I do not think that is the text being callous. I think it is the text quietly admitting that the whole ugly stretch, the whirlwind, the search party, the water, the taunt, the curse, was never really about the boys. It was about a man who never once got permission to stop. And once you see that, the invitation underneath the whole passage stops being about hair jokes or bears and becomes something much simpler: rest, before you have nothing left to give the next person who asks something of you.
This past Sunday I told our congregation, before we ever got to the curse, that our couch is large enough for them to join me. I meant it as more than a joke about a full house. Rest is not something you have to earn a mantle to deserve. God did not require it of Elisha, and God does not require it of you either.
Tomorrow this series turns toward a boy who falls asleep during a sermon that runs too long, tips out a window, and gets carried back up alive. Even there, the story starts with exhaustion, a body that simply could not stay awake one more minute. It turns out the invitation to rest was never only for a grieving prophet on a hard road. It was always for the rest of us too.
What would it look like, this week, to actually take the rest nobody is going to make you audition for?
A Prayer for Today
God, thank you for a mantle I never had to earn and a rest I do not have to prove I deserve. Let me lie down in that truth before I run dry again. Amen.