Driving Home Unexpectedly in the middle of the workday, I saw a young man sitting alone on a stone wall, kicking at it rather disconsolately. He looked the picture of purposelessness, and my heart went out to him. I thought of the times I had found myself feeling the way he looked—times when I was between jobs, worried I'd never work again, feeling as if the world simply didn't need what I could give.
And then I was reminded of something I'd read in the Bible. It was about the prophet Elijah during a period of drought and famine. See I Kings, chap. 17 . God told him, "Arise, get thee to Zarephath, which belongeth to Zidon, and dwell there: behold, I have commanded a widow woman there to sustain thee." Elijah did so, and encountered the woman. He asked her for water and bread, but she said that she had just a tiny bit of meal (flour), with which she would cook something for her son and herself before they died. Elijah wasn't fazed by this; he knew God's goodness and His purpose to sustain them, so he asked the seemingly unreasonable: make him, Elijah, "a little cake first," and afterward she could make something for her son and herself. She did so, and there was enough food for all for "many days."
This story is not a fairy tale, and it doesn't simply illustrate a miracle. It shows the natural effect of grasping the spiritual laws of God, which are absolutely good, and always at work in behalf of all. People today are proving on a daily basis the authority of these laws in the healing of sickness and other difficulties.
