What are You Talking About?
“And Elisha prayed, and said, Lord, I pray thee, open his eyes, that he may see. And the Lord opened the eyes of the young man and he saw: and, behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire round about Elisha.” 2 Kings 6:17 KJV
It’s hard when someone close to you gets mad at you. This is especially true when you are working so hard to “do something for them.” Sometimes the best intentions turn into the biggest screw ups. Then, no matter how hard you try, it resides in their memory for almost forever.
My father has always been one who finds it very easy to make friends. He had an outgoing personality that didn’t mind acting silly at times. His sarcastic side would always keep you on your toes. Fear didn’t seem to be in his vocabulary.
Dad never knew failure. Each time he didn’t succeed, he would just chalk it up to a learning experience of how not to do it. The only way to learn was to try it out. If something needed to be fixed, he didn’t call a repairman. He tried to do it himself.
On the rare instances he needed someone who actually knew what they were doing, he was right there beside him, helping him. Later in life, after I became a plumber, this could be quite the annoyance. Having someone stand over top of you, offering suggestions, when you know the best way to do it, or just need some alone minutes to think it through, really made it difficult to work around him.
Still, like most sons, I always have sought my father’s approval. Most of the “common sense” I’ve earned during my life, I can attribute to these admiring eyes watching him. Through watching him I have learned many lessons. One of those lessons has taught me to be able to see a finished product even before I start it.
There are several passages in the Bible where it states that some object, like a marker or grave, is there to this day. This used to confuse me because if you looked up some of them, today, no one has a clue where they are.
If the Bible said it is there to this day, shouldn’t it be easy to find it? Well, what it actually saying is that when that writer wrote that passage, that item is still there. The actual time between when the item was originally there and when the author wrote about it could have been an impressive hundreds or thousands of years.
The author isn’t saying they will always be there because he can’t see into the future. It’s more like, “Believe it or not, that item is still there today.” Or he could be trying to say, “I don’t know how it is still there today, but it is.”
It is in that spirit that I have struggled with Presidential items like birthplaces. “Why are some Presidential birthplaces not honored?” might be one of my questions. “What do you mean you don’t know exactly where a President was born? He is one of less than 50 people who has held the highest office in our land. Doesn’t that merit some aura of those hallowed grounds?” I might continue.
The problem with that train of thought is that the person, who would eventually become President, was just an ordinary child when he was born. Many were born with very humble beginnings. Poverty yields more no-names than it does names engraved on a plaque of honor.
Every shack that a poor soul lives in can’t be saved. The disadvantages that the poor encounter are often too great to overcome. Progress often plows the fields where their homes resided to make a better place for those who are better off.
Can you just imagine meeting a President when he was just a young lad? The truth could possibly be that you have, you just don’t recognize him or her yet. One day, one of those children that crosses your path might become a President.
Like I said, my Dad was never afraid to try anything. One of those projects was learning how to grow a garden. When my Dad delivered bread to grocery stores, he would make friends with other vendors filling their shelves with various products they sold.
One of the friends my Dad made had a farm not too far from our house. I’m not sure how it all started, but he talked the guy into letting him grow a garden on his farm. I’m not talking about of a couple of rows, this was many rows, with each row many yards long.
Dad never graduated from high school. He would get his GED later. The way my Dad gained his knowledge was through reading and talking to people who were knowledgeable about the topic that interested him. This was in the days before computers and the internet, so he would buy books and magazines.
One year he decided to grow corn. He read up on the topic. A persistent pest of corn, as well as most other vegetables, is insects. There’s nothing worse than putting in all the hard work to get the plants to grow and then having the insects decide that you must have planted the garden for them.
My Dad read somewhere that mineral oil was good for keeping those pesky insects away from corn. So Dad filled an eyedropper with mineral oil and went to every ear of corn and put a drop of mineral oil on every of them. There were so many ears of corn. His farmer friend just laughed at him.
A couple of days later, we returned to the garden. The first thing my Dad wanted to do was check on his corn. To his horror, every ear of corn was gone. The raccoons had come and taken it all and eaten it. His farmer friend pointed over the hill to the pile of corn husks they had left after their meal.
The farmer laughed at my Dad and said he must have buttered it just the way they liked it. My Dad was not amused.
It is perhaps one of the most interesting Presidential birth stories. It’s such an absurd story and that’s what makes it so interesting. First, you have to look at his parents. They were immigrants from Ireland.
When his parents arrived in America they didn’t land in some fancy city or such. No, they plopped down in the hallow grounds that use to belong to the Waxhaw Indians. They weren’t thinking that their third child was one day going to grow up and be the leader of their new found county. They were just struggling to find a place to set up house.
Their plot lied on the southern border, just walking distance to the colony below them. In fact, his Mom’s sister and brother-in-law, his aunt and uncle, actually had a plot of land that straddled both colonies. Because of this, no one is absolutely sure in which colony their houses really sat. Being family, and so close, I’m sure family visits were a common thing for both families.
Just a few days before this future President was born, his Dad died. He had hurt himself clearing some land a few days earlier and never recovered. This would make this President the first of three Presidents whose father died before he was born.
Family and friends wrapped his father’s dead body in a blanket and made their way to the Old Waxhaw Presbyterian Church for the funeral. Well, they were either celebrating his father’s life or trying to overcome their sorrow, but whatever the reason, they got drunk.
The group was so drunk that they didn’t notice that the body had slipped off the sled and landed in a creek along the way. Imagine their surprise when they got to the church and discovered the body was missing. They had to backtrack to find and retrieve it so the funeral could continue.
One of the hardest things with a job is to follow someone who has been extremely successful at it. If someone is a flop at a job, usually anything you do is better than the person before you. Following a successful person not only burdens you with learning the job, but it often feels like you have to perform at a level that doesn’t miss a beat from the other person.
The Bible is filled with stories of people following successful people. Just like real life, those stories have hits and misses to a successful transition. Joshua did pretty good job following Moses. Rehoboam pretty much flopped following his father, Solomon, into the Jewish kingship.
One of those transition opportunities happened between two prophets. The first prophet, quite frankly, had good days and bad days, but most remember him as one of the greatest prophets ever. To follow in his footsteps would have been a real challenge.
At times, this older prophet fiercely stood up to the opposition. Other times, though, he almost has a run and hide attitude when surrounded by opposition. Still, God seems to tell him to train his replacement. His replacement is eager to learn from this bigger-than-life prophet.
When this older prophet takes his final walk on this earth, the prophet’s apprentice followed behind him like a shadow. When the prophet ascends into heaven, the now new prophet, walks back on the same path they both came in on. He also performs his first miracle as the new “top dog” among the prophets.
I can only remember one time that my Dad really got mad at me. It had to do with the garden. As a teenage boy I was tiring of having to go over to the garden all the time, so my attitude probably wasn’t in the right spot anyway. When we would get to the garden, I would do my assigned task as quickly as I could. Then I would beg for us to return home.
One year my Dad discovered a new type of squash. It was called Spaghetti Squash. I had never heard of it before, but I’m no farmer so a squash was a squash. This squash must have been one of my father’s pride and joys.
On this particular day, my Dad gave me the chore of picking the Zucchini Squash. Sometimes my Dad could get in a mood where you just didn’t ask him questions, you just did what he said. So off to the other side of the garden I went to pick all the “Zucchini Squash” that was ready.
I was so excited because, boy, did I picked a lot of it. I bet there was at least a bushel of it that I picked. When I brought it back to show my Dad I was utterly surprised by his reaction. Instead, of grateful eyes, I was greeted with a look of terror.
Like I said, to me, a squash is a squash. I had picked every single Spaghetti Squash that had grown. The problem was, not a single one of them was ready to be picked yet. The best way to sum it up is that I never had to worry about going to the garden again.
You know how you have those family stories that, many years later, you laugh about. That one was so bad that no one ever brought it up in my Dad’s presence. I heard my Mom talking about it one day, when my Dad wasn’t around, and she said she can never remember my Dad being so mad about anything else.
As if our Presidential birthplace couldn’t get any stranger, after the funeral, his mother headed to her sister’s house. Still a few days from giving birth to the future President, she would stay there. When the big Presidential birthday came, you guessed it, our future President was born in his aunt’s house.
Although most people recognize President Andrew Jackson’s birthplace as being in the colony now called South Carolina, no one is absolutely positive. Since his aunt’s property straddled both North and South Carolina, he might have been born in North Carolina.
Still other rumors stated that Andrew Jackson was actually born in Virginia, Pennsylvania, or even in his parent’s homeland of Ireland. One rumor even claims that he was born on the ship while his parents were traveling to America.
There you have it, the first Presidential birth controversy.
As Elijah was heading to his final moments as the “top dog” prophet, Elisha was close behind him. When Elijah wanted to go to the end of the line on his own, Elisha would have none of it. So, Elijah parted the Jordan. Then both Elijah and Elisha crossed over it on dry land.
After Elijah was taken up to heaven by a chariot of fire, Elisha returned the way he came. When he got to the Jordan, he did his first “top dog” prophet miracle by parting that same Jordan.
Sometime later, Elisha performed another miracle. It’s one you don’t hear too much about. Seems people were complaining about how polluted the water was. Apparently, it wasn’t good for anything; drinking or even for putting on plants.
Elisha takes a bowl of salt. He goes to the spring and sprinkles some salt on it. Boom! The water problem is fixed. But it is the strange way the story ends that caught my attention. 2 Kings 2:22 states:
“So the waters were healed unto this day, according to the saying of Elisha which he spake.”
The passage doesn’t mention where the spring was, so I’m not sure how you can go to those “healed” springs today. I’m not sure anyone actually knows where they are.
Quite honestly, life often doesn’t make sense. One day you are just trying to help your father and the next thing you know, you have done something you never want to remind him of again. Sometimes celebrities, like Presidents, seem like nobodies when you try to find out more about them, such as where their birthplaces are. That famous Biblical fresh water stream is who knows where.
We spend a lot of time trying to figure these little things out. It bothers us that we don’t know the answers. Surely, there has to be an answer out there somewhere.
Life is full of these questions. Why does this coronavirus just seem to hang around perplexing everyone? No matter how hard I try, why can’t I ever get ahead? Disasters strike good people as well as bad people. Why?
They are all very tough questions. There is one tool we often refuse to use, though, to find those answers. That tool is faith. Faith is the ability to accept that you don’t need to know the answer because the One with all the answers chooses not to send out press releases with an answer on it. We fail to realize, like in another Elisha story, His angels are right there fighting for us (see today’s Bible verse).
Faith is acknowledging God knowing the answers is enough. Proof that you trust that faith is displayed by not questioning His “silence” on your question or not getting upset that He doesn’t answer it the way we want it answered.
Prayer: Dear Mighty Father, I must confess, my patience can sometimes grow thin when waiting on answers from You. Help me to have the faith to know that when I can’t understand the way things are, I can trust that You have it all under control. Amen.
