Beginnings...

9-12-10, 6:36pm

So here I am. Sitting in my bedroom in Nashville. My parents left today. It’s been quite a weekend, filled with lots of thing happening in a short amount of time.  Buying groceries to stock the fridge & cabinets, setting up the living, kitchen, bathroom and bedroom. Oh, and, not to mention moving away from home for the first time! (10 hours to be exact)

I have definitely cried some, and I’ve had this strange nervous feeling all day-but instead of butterfly’s in my stomach, they felt more like angry pterodactyls. I hope it goes away. I don’t like pterodactyls. (Side-note: I think more words should be spelled with a silent letter at the beginning of them.)

Today Joy (my roommate) and I were watching “The Wedding Planner” to take my mind off of reality for a bit, and as we are watching the scene where an “inebriated” J.Lo mention’s Jezebel being the only queen in the Bible to be eaten by dogs, I ask Joy if she had ever read that story. So I did a little search on my techno-savvy iphone Bible, and started reading 1 Kings Chapter 18. I read out loud through the story of Elijah and the prophets of Baal on Mount Caramel. The story is pretty intense, and interesting. Let me just jog your memory here:  Ahab is a king and he has decided that worshipping idols and false gods, instead of Israel’s God, is a good idea, so he has everyone in the kingdom do it. Elijah has instructions from The Lord, the REAL God, to go see Ahab about this idol worship he’s been promoting. He goes out and challenges all the prophets of Baal to a little contest- a “my God can beat up your god!” kind of thing. The God who answers by sending fire on the altar will be proved to be the real God.  The prophets of Baal (450 of them) all prepared a sacrifice to be made to their god, called to their god for close to about 5 hours, with no answer. Elijah starts making fun of them, saying “Oh, your god hasn’t answered you with fire from heaven or anything. Maybe he’s watching TV, or he’s in the bathroom....Or maybe he went on a trip. You know he could be sleeping-maybe you could wake him up!”  So they cried out loud and cut themselves to ribbons, getting  blood all over the place. This went on til about 2 or 3 in the afternoon with no response from their god.(duh.)

So Elijah gets his altar together, built with twelve stones to represent the twelve tribes of the sons of Jacob. He also built a trench around the altar, had the people dump several gallons of water on the wood, altar, and enough to fill up the trench.

Then Elijah prayed.

Then God showed ‘em who’s boss.

He sent fire and consumed the offering on the altar, the wood, the stones, the dust, AND even licked up all the water that was standing in the trench!

The people fell on their faces and said “The Lord, He is God! The Lord, He is God”.

After this they end up killing all the prophets of Baal.

The part that really gets me is right after this, though.  When Queen Jezebel finds out that Elijah killed all her precious little prophets, she swears to do to him what he did to them.

Elijah hears about her threat and runs away to the wilderness. He RAN AWAY! From a woman! (She must have been quite a powerful woman.) 

So, after all of that boldness and crazy prayer on Mt. Caramel, and God totally showing up to prove Himself powerful, Elijah runs away, afraid for his life. He actually came to the point of asking God to take his life from him, cause he felt he was “no better than his fathers”.

Reading this today made me feel better about myself. If Elijah was afraid, even after such an obvious display of God’s power, I guess I am okay feeling a little nervous about a new life here in Tennessee.

I am weak.  Sometimes I want to run away. Even though there’s no one physically threatening my life, there are still times when it seems life itself is chasing me down.

New, exciting adventures seem great, until you’re in the middle of them and you’re not sure how everything will turn out in the end.

I say, all the more reason to press on. Press forward to what lies ahead of us. It may be a mystery, but we have a God who is bigger than any other, who can prove Himself powerful in the scariest and darkest of circumstances, and in the boldness, honesty and fervent prayers of His little sheep.

I am in the middle of a new and exciting adventure called apartment living. Ten hours from my family, everything I’ve ever known, in a city full of people I don’t know. 

God has called me here for such a time as this. He has shown Himself powerful over the course of my entire life, and I know He will continue to do so as I follow Him on this journey to His Kingdom come.