Your Limit Is God’s Starting Point

By Pastor Onyema Duruigbo
So the Zarephath widow said to Prophet Elijah in 1Kings 17:12: As the Lord your God lives, I do not have bread, only a handful of flour in a bin, and a little oil in a jar; and see, I am gathering a couple of sticks that I may go in and prepare it for myself and my son, that we may eat it, and die.
She refused to be consoled. Her husband’s death drained her life.
Night after night and day after day she wept by his grave side. She clutched the red earth and robbed it on her half clad breast as though that will bring him back to life.
Sometimes the only child joined in the weeping orchestra that can melt even the hardest of hearts.
But time as always is God’s best amnesia. The sores and the hurts get dulled with the caress of time.
Here she is now. Like the new leaf out of the winter choke, life is breaking through the clouds of pains and her skin testify to harmony that is welling within.
The calamity broke loose. Heaven became brass and earth became steel. Grasses withered and animals died. Reason…..Ahab quarreled with God, and Elijah quarreled with Ahab and God “quarreled” with rain, and rain “quarreled” with the earth.
How does this concern her? Just like everything else, we all are sometimes victims of someone’s wrong decisions.
But we serve the God of mercies and exemptions. So while the widow tossed and turned like the human we are. God has as always other ideas. In her world, that morsel remaining is the end, but with God, that morsel is the key to a fresh beginning.
Isn’t it wonderful how our limit is God’s starting point.
See her at the city gate musing at the vanity of life-the wastefulness of human struggles ending with the little morsel. Such is the fate of humanity without divinity.
Is our world caving in on our limitations? Whether it be health, or something else, the taste is often bitter if the horizon is overshadowed with uncertainty.
Elijah gate crashed into her anxiety. Use what is not enough in your hands as ladder to heaven’s treasure base. To the ignorant, huggers and clutches, the proposition is the limit. As always nothing in the hands of greed is ever enough. Ask the looters.
To the discerning, it is not always that strangers burst into the scene. Flowing with the divine tide gets you faster to your destiny.
Now this widow clutched to his words. She let go scarcity that she might swim in divine abundance.
Even in this era of pain, this period of biting scarcity, in these times of uncertainty, God will never allow you to die in your responsibility.
And Elijah said to her in 1 Kings 17:13-14: Do not fear; go and do as you have said, but make me a small cake from it first, ……..For thus says the Lord God of Israel: The bin of flour shall not be used up, nor shall the jar of oil run dry, until the day the Lord sends rain on the earth.