Grammy nominated singer & author, Michele Pillar, shares the short and beautiful biblical story of the Shunammite woman, encouraging us to have faith in God’s promises.
One of my favorite women in all of scripture is a gal tucked tightly between the pages of Second Kings. If you blink, you’ll miss her. But I’m so glad I didn’t. She’s known as the Shunammite Woman and I absolutely love everything about her.
She invested in one of God’s anointed Prophets, Elisha by building him a room, attached to her house. She wanted him to have a nice place he could count on, when passing though town, which was often. She did this for one reason, because she could. She had no agenda, no 24-hour prophetic hot-line privileges. She did it because she “perceived him a holy man of God who comes by here often.” Smart girl.
When she showed Elisha his new flat, he was so moved he asked her if she needed anything. She said nothing. But being a Prophet, he knew her secret. She’d always wanted a child. Who knows why she and her husband could not conceive, but when Elisha began telling her she’d hold a baby in her arms by the next year, she raised her voice to him and said, “do not deceive me!” What she was really saying is “I’m afraid to believe in such unbelievable, beautiful dream come true!”
She indeed bore a son, just as Elisha said she would and one day when the son was working in the field with his father, he became gravely ill. Hours later, the young boy died in his mother’s arms. (This is where it gets really good.) She didn’t run out to the field, waving her arms, screaming hysterically to find relief from her husband. She quietly carried her dead son up to Elisha’s empty room, laid his wilted body on Elisha’s bed, saddled her donkey and told her husband she was going to town. When her husband asked her why, she said four very powerful words, “it will be well.” In the original language, Hebrew, she said, “shalom, shalom,” or, “very well.” When she got to Elisha she gave him a piece of her mind saying, “I asked you not to deceive me!” Elisha followed her back to the house, went up to his room to find the dead boy. Elisha closed the door and laid his body on top of the cold boy. He put his mouth over his mouth and his eyes over the boy’s eyes. And the boy became warm and awoke from the dead. Elisha called for the boy’s mother and she bowed his feet, took up her son and went out.
Has God ever promised you something and then seemingly took it away? Did you say, “all will be well?” I can’t remember ever doing that. There have been times when I thought God was playing a cruel trick on me, but every single time, in time, I realized that God can be trusted, and eventually, all is well. It’s a hard pill to swallow but if you have a big faith, that faith may be tested to glorify God and give weaker faiths a chance to grow and believe for more. This woman invested in God’s anointed and her investment paid back a hundred fold. Although a wise move, it wasn’t her investment God honored; it was her faith that, “all was well”. No matter what. Thumb back through your Old Testament and find this wonderful woman in,
2 Kings 4:8-37, that way when we see her in heaven we can all get together and throw a party in her honor!
Wow. So good. All is well.