Mirrors of His Glory

“He took the mantle of Elijah that had fallen from him, and struck the water, saying, “Where is the Lord, the God of Elijah?” And when he had struck the water, the water was parted to the one side and to the other.”  II Kings 2:14

Henry Ford didn’t the invent the car, but once he got started, no one ever made them the same way again.  Fats Domino wasn’t the first to play the jazz piano, but once you had heard him, they said, it was like something entirely new.  People had dunked a basketball before Michael Jordan stepped onto the court, but now you can’t imagine that feat without him. 

Elijah wasn’t the first prophet, either.  People had been moved to speak God’s Word before, they had stood fast for the truth when it wasn’t popular.  But the mysterious man from Tishbe changed the meaning of prophecy forever.

Elijah had called the people to spiritual renewal and denounced corrupt kings face to face.  He worked great miracles of healing and destruction.  He had summoned fire from heaven and withheld the rains for three and a half years.  God fed Elijah in the wilderness with bread delivered by ravens and revealed to him His glory on the side of Mount Sinai. 

Elijah did it all clad in a mantle. 

Taking Easter Home

“Behold, he goeth before you into Galilee; there shall ye see him.”  St. Matthew 28:7

One of the special things about settling in the DC area for Allison and me is spending time in the city where we fell in love.  Back in the summer of 2003, I had just finished my studies at seminary and was getting ready to begin as a teacher at a boarding school near Hagerstown.  Allison was a public policy student completing her mandatory student internship at a organization on Capitol Hill.  I’d meet her after work in the grand hall of Union Station and we’d head off to one of those free concerts at the Kennedy Center or we’d sit and talk in one of those pleasant little parks near the Capitol, or share a meal in that most exotic and romantic locale, the food court in the basement of the train station.

Sometimes, when we’ve got the kids in the backseat and we’re headed off to a museum on the Mall or to see a friend who lives across town, we’ll drive by one of these places and tell them a little about what it meant to us then.   So much that has happened since then that we never expected, but many of the good things we do enjoy now were planted there.  Going back to those places, we fall in love again, or at least we understand something valuable about the love we share now, something we can only discover there, where it all began.