Brook Cherith

I know God is trying to tell me something when I come across 3 or more references to the same passage of scripture from completely different sources.

When those sources all pointed to Elijah's Brook Cherith it got me thinking...

Elijah would have spent close to a year at the Brook Cherith. What would that have been like? No TV, no Internet, no friends, no society, complete solitude, food covered in bird saliva and a diminishing brook. What did he do? Train for the mad dash that would lead to a good chariot butt kicking? Did he feel useless or lethargic? Impatient and frustrated? Lonely and abandoned?

In Brook Cherith fashion, God has given me extended periods of solitude this summer. When there is nothing else to look at you can't avoid the mirror God places in front of you.

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) observed,

There is your world within.
There rid the dragons, root out the sin.
Your will is law in that small commonweal.

God has given me time to see myself and where my own will/law doesn't match up with His. In His grace and mercy, He didn't leave me to clean the mirror myself; He picked up His own solvent and rag and began to scrub.

Cleaning the mirror is brutal labor. It is a kind of death; death to self; death to flesh; death to pride; a severing of flesh from bone. It takes more than a little bit of Windex and a super-absorbent paper towel (sorry Mr Clean, this job is too big for you). No solvent apart from the blood of the Lord Jesus can make the mirror shine the way He intended.

The end result? Again, the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins,

Hope holds to Christ the mind's own mirror out
To take His lovely likeness more and more.

As much as I hate the pain of it, I am grateful for the Brook Cherith; God meets me there. To have more of His likeness and to hear the sound of His voice is a reward that far exceeds any kind of pain endured.

No pain comes to me that has not passed through Him first. I can trust the man who died for me. If you can't trust Him, who can you trust?