I have conversations with people at difficult times. I offer comfort. I offer words of encouragement. I offer prayer. And then I remind people to eat.

It sounds like an odd thing for a chaplain to suggest.

But it’s not.

As I often say at the end of funerals, “God built us to need food regularly. God built us to love stories. So we’re gathering for a meal to tell stories about the one we loved and lost.”

The trouble is, when we’re troubled, we forget to eat. And then we get in trouble.

With the lack of food and fluids, our bodies get weak. Our minds can’t handle the pressure well. In the fatigue and feeling of stress, we get angry, we get desperate. We say what we don’t really mean. We do what we don’t really want.

That’s what happened to Elijah.

He was an Old Testament Prophet.

Many of us have a picture on our heads when I say that. We see a haggard bearded man who looks angry, speaking words of woe and destruction.

Which was sometimes true.

Not because prophets were angry by nature, but because they had to carry God’s words. And God’s words weren’t angry by nature. In fact, his deepest desire it to love and to bless.

But when the people he loved rejected his attempts to bless them time after time after time, and they chose to run the other direction, to flirt with other gods, to give their hearts to images of wood and stone, then God drew lines. He spoke out consequences.

And prophets are the ones who carry that message.

If you keep running, you’ll find yourself wrecked.
If you come back home, you’ll find yourself rest.