https://open.spotify.com/episode/1aCLPmfIGAIAhfziGAo8Uu?si=TESDpI2bReeB53Ms_gaBQQ

Now there were four men with leprosy at the entrance of the city gate. They said to each other, “Why stay here until we die? If we say, ‘We’ll go into the city’—the famine is there, and we will die. And if we stay here, we will die. So let’s go over to the camp of the Arameans and surrender. If they spare us, we live; if they kill us, then we die.”
2 Kings 7:3-4 (NIV)

Back in 2008, my parents sold Wendy and me their property on Lake of the Ozarks, along with the 1972 single-wide trailer home that sat on it. Wendy and I immediately made plans to put a new home on the property, but the economy went south as we were making plans. The housing market tanked. All of the banks we applied to for a loan rejected us. The hard fact was we were stuck with our 1972 single-wide with its dark wood paneling, orange shag carpeting, and the toilet about ready to fall through the rotted-out bathroom floor. C’est la vie!

Months later, I got an unexpected phone call from a small town bank in Kansas. The President of the bank called me to say, “I have this application for a loan to build you and Wendy a house on the Lake of the Ozarks. I like it. We’d like to build your house for you.”

“Wait a minute,” I said, not believing my ears. “The housing market is in the tank. Every major bank has rejected us. What happens if we get the house built and we find ourselves backwards financially because of the market?”

The president of the bank say, “Then I guess we’ll have to live with one another for a while until things straighten out.”

I went home and looked up this little town bank in Belleville, Kansas. There on the banner it said, “New Century Bank…Faith Gives Us Life” then On the About Us page I read, “What is faith? It is the confident assurance that what we hope for is going to happen. The name New Century Bank is taken from the beginning of the first century AD from the event that changed the world, the birth of Jesus Christ.”

I later learned that it was our builder who submitted the application for our project to the bank. We had no idea.

That event came to mind today as I read today’s chapter, which completes the story that began at the end of yesterday’s chapter. The Arameans lay seige to the capital of Israel, Samaria. They surround the city, cut off supplies, and soon the King of Israel and everyone inside the city is starving to death. The king, desperate and angry that God seems to have abandoned them, goes to murder Elisha. Elisha tells the king that the siege will be over the next day and life will return to normal.

Four lepers at the city gate, with absolutely no hope and zero good choices available to them, decide to surrender to the Arameans. Aramean mercy is the only possible positive outcome available to them. When they arrive at the camp, they find it completely abandoned. God had caused the Arameans to believe Israel had made alliances with the Egyptian and Hittite armies to wipe them out – and they fled in terror for their lives. At first, the four lepers began to take their share of the best plunder, but then thought better of it and returned to the city gate to share the good news.

Yesterday’s chapter centered on Elisha’s servant being terrified because he could see the Aramean army but couldn’t see the heavenly army surrounding Elisha. Today everybody in Samaria can see their circumstances. There’s no food – in yesterday’s chapter, women had already begun eating their own children. The enemy has them surrounded. Death is approaching. There is no apparent escape.

Those facts aren’t imaginary. But they’re incomplete.

Because while Samaria is starving behind its walls, God is already emptying the enemy camp. Nobody inside Samaria knows it. The king doesn’t know. His officer doesn’t know. The starving citizens don’t know. Perhaps even Elisha doesn’t know precisely how God is going to accomplish what God has promised.

Meanwhile, somewhere beyond their field of vision, the circumstances have already changed. Their reality has changed before their awareness of reality catches up.

I tend to interpret God’s activity based upon the information currently available to me. The diagnosis. The bank balance. The obvious tension in the relationship. The disappointing phone call. The closed door. The career that didn’t unfold according to the script.

I look at the circumstances surrounding the walls and laying siege to my life and reasonably conclude: “Well, this is the reality. These are the facts.”

Yes. But I don’t know that it’s all of them.

God may already be doing something beyond the walls that I can’t yet see. And I love that the first people to discover what God has done in today’s chapter aren’t the king, the powerful, or the spiritually impressive. It’s four poor, desperate lepers who basically say: “Well, we’re screwed either way. Might as well start walking.”

There’s something almost comically human about it. Once again, it’s downright Shakespearean. They don’t march out with heroic faith. They simply take the next available step. And that step leads them straight into abundance.

In the quiet this morning, I find this the spiritual invitation of today’s chapter. I don’t always need to know what God is doing beyond the walls of my realities. Sometimes I simply need enough faith to get up…and start walking. Because somewhere between “there’s no way out” and “who could possibly have imagined this?” there may be an abandoned enemy camp waiting to be discovered. Or, an unexpected phone call from a bank president in Kansas.

And when you stumble into grace like that, there’s only one appropriate response: “This is a day of good news. We cannot keep it to ourselves.”

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