What is your oil?

Today, in Selah, I was reading the story in I Kings 4 about Elisha, the widow and her two sons. Ironically that is what today's Streams in the Desert entry is about too. Carmichael is asking, What do you have? What is your oil? What has God put within you that he is trying to get you to use? You don't have to generate something from the outside. We can exhaust ourselves doing many good things. But what would happen if we slow down, listen to him, inventory our lives and determine what our life is saying to those around us?


Now, Mrs. Cowman's point about I Kings 4 might be useful in finding your life's message. She grabs Elisha's words from the text: "Go inside and shut the door behind you..." Her angle is so good, you really should read the April 5th entry. I want to include part of it here. "We are to enter a secret chamber of isolation in prayer and faith that is very fruitful. At certain times and places God will build a mysterious wall around us. He will take away all the supports we customarily lean upon, and will remove our ordinary ways of doing things. God will close us off to something divine, completely new and unexpected, and that cannot be understood by examining our previous circumstances. We will be in a place where we do not know what is happening, where God is cutting the cloth of our lives by a new pattern, and thus where He causes us to look to Him....Like the widow we must be detached from outward things and attached inwardly to the Lord alone..."

Now here is a good place for me to move into what God is cutting from my cloth. Next post...