A Still Small Voice: Reflections on 1 Kings 19:11-14

I. Wind

Goliath wind, you push me around like a school yard bully, maligning me inside my pea coat jacket. The black trees stand with their frozen feet, like fair weather friends who would rather watch the show down than shelter me from impending doom. They shake their barren branches, taunting me—lest I hope—there is no new life in the dead of winter.

II. Earthquake

And I am here in this place again, looking into the eyes of my enemy, so much larger than life, this little life, almost swallowed by the macabre. The pale sky seems so much farther away now, like blood drained from a face—like God’s seeming absence. And they are there in Haiti, in Sheol, where people cry a thousand tears a day. And we wonder if we are alone—or worse—seared together forever with a loss as big and invisible as the howling wind.

III. Fire

Then red Kali comes wearing her necklace of skeletons, yielding her knife to no one. She dances on the wounds that opened up to tears and fills them up with wood. Without hesitation she tosses in a match and sets the sorrow ablaze. Some fight for justice, some go berserk, and some sit like phantom kings upon their indignant thrones and feel nothing at all. Was it you who toppled the rocks from their cliff as you passed them by? Or were you in the devouring mouth that swallowed up all those precious children? Or were you in the raging flames of heat that passed through our chests when we all stood abject—eyes shielded—from the unbelievable mountain of ashes?

IV. Silence

Or are you a seed beneath this frozen earth, quietly making your new life?