Among the qualities that I tend to equate with a great Christian book is what it opens up to me from the Bible. For instance, upon reading "The Ragamuffin Gospel," I was practically forced to re-read Luke one more time due to a sparked interest. Flipping through Eugene Peterson's "The Jesus Way," I got an unexpected spark - this time for reading the life of Elijah.

Peterson's chapter on Elijah was rich enough to re-read a second time in and of itself. Here's one snippet of that chapter to savor for now.

"The Jesus Way"
(pages 107-109)

The Widow
Elijah does go into hiding by the brook Cherith in Gilead, safe from reprisal from Ahab and Jezebel. After they have deciphered the blasphemous implications of his sermon they do go looking for him. And God does take care of Elijah as he had assured him he would. Each morning ravcens bring him a breakfast of bread and meat, each evening a supper of bread and meat. And the brook provides living water.

We are in familiar country here. If God could provide bread (manna) and meat (quail) for the Israelites in the Sinai wilderness for a great company of his people, it is no great surprise to find him taking care of his lone prophet in the Gilead wilderness. The ravens are a nice touch. Against the overall background of the Ahab-Jezebel and Ball-Asherah coalition and its signature drought, Elijah enjoys the hospitality of the Lord's "table in the wilderness" (Ps. 78:19), served morning and evening by the elegant ravens. God's providence is never characterized in broad generalities or pious abstractions but always in the particular, in the personal, in the recognition of grace in an unlikely time, at an unlikely place. Who could have anticipated ravens?

And then the brook dries up and providence shows up in a new way. God now directs Elijah to the town of Zarephath in Sidon. This is a surprise. Gilead was more or less obvious as a hideout, remote and not easily accessible. Out of reach of Ahab and Jezebel. Zarephath is in Sidon, Jezebel's backyard, an area not only inhabited by the people Jezebel grew up with but teeming with the gods and goddesses she is determined to bring into Israel. This is hostile country, dangerously hostile for a man on the run, a man attempting to live incognito.

But Elijah is not a man to calculate his chances. He knows how to obey orders, even when the orders make no sense (maybe especially when the orders make no sense). He goes where God directs him and finds himself cared for not by Gilead ravens this time but by an even more unlikely hand of providence, a starving widow. She gives him her more unlikely hand of providence, a starving widow. She gives him her last meal, a meal that she is getting ready to cook and eat with her son after which the two of them will die together. That is the plan. But it doesn't turn out according to plan. The hospitality the widow shows Elijah is transfigured into the hospitality that Elijah shows the widow and son. Giving begets giving. The little becomes much.

Once we have the entire story of Elijah before us, it will become clear that his life in the wilderness and with the widow, his out-of-the-way life, marginal to everything we assume is important and significant, is foundational to whatever effectiveness he will have when he has the attention of the world. Elijah is as much a prophet in the impoverished widow's home in Zarephath as he was, alone with God's ravens, alongside the wilderness brook Cherith in Gilead, and as he will be, more famously, on Mount Carmel. He is the same man in obscurity as he is in the spotlight.

We are not told how long Elijah spent with the ravens by the brook and with the widow in her impoverished home, but it could have been as long as three years, the time between when Elijah left Ahab pondering the drought sermon and the time Elijah showed up again to arrange for the showdown on Mount Carmel. It wouldn't be either the first or last time that a long period of seclusion, sustained by providential hospitality, was required to build the "highways to Zion" (Ps. 84:5) in a man or a woman's heart. Herman Melville wrote that his isolating years on a whaling ship were "my Harvard and Yale." Maybe Gilead and Zarephath were Elijah's.

What amazes me most about the widow's hospitality for Elijah was that she followed Elijah down a path that involved her feeding him despite being low on food ... housing him when she expected to merely go home to die upon running out of food. Elijah tells her "For this is what the LORD, the God of Israel, says: 'The jar of flour will not be used up and the jug of oil will not run dry until the day the LORD gives rain on the land.'" Add to the scene here that there is a term in the NIV version that repeats itself in 1 Kings 17 - "Some time later." It's likely that this phrase covers a matter of years. It isn't until after one of those "some time laters" that Elijah brings the widow's son back from the dead and has her concluding with "Now I know that you are a man of God and that the word of the LORD from your mouth is the truth." Imagine all that time of feeding a total stranger (with a deathwish, no less!) with whatever degree of doubt the widow had for Elijah. She followed, she obeyed, she sowed ... all with some portion of doubt. Maybe a lot, maybe just a bit - we don't know. But she followed.