The Barrel and the Boy

At the gate of Zarephath a woman is picking up two sticks and a stranger asks her for water. As she goes, he asks for bread as well. She tells him what she has: an handful of meal in a barrel, and a little oil in a cruse, and a plan to cook it, eat it with her son, and die. He tells her to make him a little cake first.

I want to write to you about where this story goes, because it is nearly always stopped at verse sixteen. Start with who she is. Zarephath belongeth to Zidon, Jezebel's country, home of the god the drought was aimed at. God sends his prophet to be fed by an enemy civilian on the edge of ruin, and Jesus threw that at his own town and they tried to kill him for it: unto none of them was Elias sent, save unto Sarepta, a city of Sidon, unto a woman that was a widow.

She does it, and the barrel of meal wasted not, neither did the cruse of oil fail. She, and he, and her house, did eat many days. Months of evidence, every morning.

Then verse seventeen. Her son falls sick, and his sickness was so sore, that there was no breath left in him. This is what all that daily proof bought her: What have I to do with thee, O thou man of God? art thou come unto me to call my sin to remembrance, and to slay my son?

It had settled nothing for the prophet either. Up in the loft he puts a complaint of his own: hast thou also brought evil upon the widow with whom I sojourn, by slaying her son? And when the boy breathes again her verdict is now by this I know that thou art a man of God. By this, after all those mornings of meal.

A supply that holds for months is worth exactly what it is worth, and it will not answer the question that arrives at three in the morning about your child. She had both in one small house, in that order, and the second had to be given her all over again.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 246 is Blessed for Trusting (Jeremiah 17:7).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna, Year Two