Don't Bury It Yet

There are some things that are easier to preach than they are to live. It is easy to preach about trusting God when I can see God moving. It is easy to celebrate the open door and the answered prayer, when something I have prayed about finally comes together. But I have also lived long enough to know what it feels like when something doesn't happen when I thought it should. If I am not careful, disappointment can change the way I pray. I can stop asking for something, not because God told me to stop, but because I don't want to feel the pain of hoping for it again.

That is why the story of the Shunammite woman in 2 Kings 4 matters so much. Her story begins with generosity, not desperation. She sees Elisha passing through Shunem and simply feeds him. She doesn't have a prayer request waiting on the table. After several visits, she perceives that he is a holy man of God, and she convinces her husband to build a small room upstairs with a bed, a table, a chair, and a lamp. She thinks she is building a guest room. She has no idea she is building a room for a resurrection. There are things God develops in us long before we understand why we need them: a prayer life, Scripture hidden in our hearts, a habit of faithfulness. Don't despise what God has you building right now just because you can't see what it is for.

Then comes the moment that reveals what was underneath. Elisha wants to repay her kindness and offers to speak to the king or the commander of the army on her behalf. She answers, "I am living among my own people." In our language, she is saying, "I'm good." But Gehazi notices what she refuses to mention: she has no son, and her husband is old. When Elisha promises that she will hold a son by this time next year, she doesn't celebrate. She says, "Do not lie to your servant." Read that again. It is the voice of someone who has hoped before and been hurt. Somewhere along the way, hoping became too painful, so she buried the desire and learned to function without talking about it.

Some of us have done the same thing. We didn't bury a body, but we buried an expectation. We buried the possibility that something could ever be different. We put dirt over it, walked back into church, lifted our hands, kept serving, and told everybody, "I'm good." Sometimes that is real contentment, the kind that says God is enough whether He gives me what I asked for or not. But sometimes "I'm good" is what we say after we have wrapped up something we once believed God for, put it in the ground, and decided never to talk about it again. Disappointment doesn't always destroy our faith in God. Sometimes it just replaces the hedge He placed around us with our own hedge of self-preservation.
The danger is that we declare things finished based on what they look like right now. We see delay and assume denial. We watch something stop moving and start digging a grave. We become so convinced we know how the story ends that we start burying things God never told us to bury.

Look at what happens next. God gives the woman the son she had stopped asking for. If the story ended there, it would be the testimony everybody wants. But the child grows, cries out in the field, "My head! My head!", and dies on his mother's lap. Imagine the questions in that room. God, You gave him to me. I wasn't even asking anymore. Why give me something I had learned to live without, only to let it die in my arms? There are seasons when what happens to us doesn't just hurt us, it confuses us, because it doesn't seem consistent with what we thought God was doing.

But watch what she does not do. She doesn't begin preparing a burial. She carries her son upstairs, lays him on the bed of the man of God, shuts the door, and starts moving toward Elisha. Stop digging for a minute. Stop writing the obituary. Stop making permanent decisions based on a painful moment. If God has not told you the story is over, don't let disappointment write the ending for Him.

Notice also that when everyone asks how she is, she says, "It's all right." That is not denial. When she reaches Elisha, she falls at his feet and lays the whole painful truth in front of him. Faith isn't pretending the problem isn't real. Faith is looking at what happened while refusing to let what happened determine where you run. She is hurting, confused, and probably angry, but she knows where to take all of it. She goes back to the one connected to the word that gave her the promise. Somebody else's prayer cannot substitute for your own pursuit of God. Take the questions back to Him. Take the disappointment back to Him. Take the broken pieces, and the thing that doesn't look anything like you thought it would, and lay it before Him. Whatever you do, don't run away from the One who spoke just because you are confused by what you are seeing.

Then the room she built years earlier becomes the room of her resurrection. Elisha shuts the door, prays, and stretches himself over the child, mouth to mouth, eyes to eyes, hands to hands. The boy's body grows warm, but warm isn't alive, so Elisha paces and stretches out again. Then the silence breaks with a sneeze, seven times. Anywhere else a sneeze is ordinary, but where there was no breath, it is evidence that death has lost its grip. The bed where she laid what she thought she had lost becomes the bed her son gets up from.

There is a bigger picture in that room. A living man stretches himself over someone who is dead, and life comes where there was death. Humanity was dead in sin and unable to save itself, so Jesus stretched Himself out on a cross. When they laid Him in a tomb, death thought it had written the ending. Three days later, He walked out of the grave and proved that death does not always get the final word. We are resurrection people, and our entire faith is built on an empty grave. So when hell tells you that everything that looks dead has to stay dead, point back to the tomb and remember who your Savior is.

And even then, God keeps writing. In 2 Kings 8, a famine comes, and the woman lives among the Philistines for seven years. When she returns and appeals to the king for her house and field, Gehazi happens to be telling the king about the boy who was raised from the dead. At that exact moment, she and her son walk through the door. The king commands that everything be restored, including the income from her land for every year she was gone. Every time life tried to put a period somewhere, God kept writing.
That is why you have to be careful about deciding how your story ends while you are standing in the middle of it. Pain does not get to take God's pen out of His hand.

Disappointment does not become sovereign because it hurt you. A bad chapter does not have the authority to declare itself the final chapter. Whatever page you are standing on today, trust the Author more than you trust the page. If it hurts, take it to Him. If you are confused, take it to Him. If you have stopped hoping because disappointment taught you to protect yourself, take that to Him too. Don't put dirt over something just because you can't see what God is doing with it right now.

Don't bury it yet.