BackstageThere is a story tucked into the middle of the book of Kings that I did not understand for years, because I thought it was a story about an army. It is not. It is a story about eyes.
The prophet Elisha had been quietly ruining the plans of a foreign king. Every time the king set an ambush, Elisha somehow knew, and warned his own people, and the trap closed on empty ground. The king finally decided the prophet himself was the problem, and sent an entire force — horses and chariots, a serious army — to surround the small town of Dothan by night and take one man.
And so a young servant, the prophet's helper, got up early in the morning the way young men do, and walked out onto the height where the town sat, and looked down, and saw them. The whole ring of them. Horses everywhere. Chariots everywhere. An army that had come in the dark for the express purpose of ending his master and, presumably, him. And he did what any of us would do. He came apart. He ran back and cried out something like: what are we going to do? We are surrounded. It is over.
I want you to sit in that morning with him for a second, because I have had that morning. You wake up on the high ground where you thought you were safe, and the light comes, and the light shows you exactly how outnumbered you are. The illness. The debt. The thing that has come in the night to end you. The sheer size of what is arrayed against your one small life. And the fear that follows is not irrational. The boy was not imagining the army. The army was really there.
The prayer he did not pray
Here is the first thing that undoes me about this story.
The prophet does not pray for the army to leave. He does not call down fire, not yet, and he does not ask God to airlift them out. He says something quiet to the terrified boy first — those who are with us are more than those who are with them — which, from where the young man was standing, must have sounded like the raving of a man who had not looked out the window.
And then Elisha prays the strangest prayer. He does not ask God to change the situation at all. He asks God to change the boy's sight. Open his eyes, he prays. Let him see.
And Yahuah opened the young man's eyes, and he looked again at the same hill he had just been staring at in despair — and the hill was full. The whole mountain around Elisha was covered with horses and chariots of fire. A host. An army of light that had been there the entire time, ringing the prophet, filling the high country, more numerous than the force below and belonging to a different order altogether.
Nothing on the ground had changed. Not one enemy chariot had moved. The only thing that changed was what the young man could see. And that changed everything, because it turned out the hill had never been as empty as it looked. It was crowded. It had been crowded the whole time. He had been standing in the middle of a host and mistaking it for a desert.
Why I stopped believing in the empty room
I do a lot of my worship alone, up high, where no one can hear me, and for a long time part of me quietly believed I was singing into emptiness. That the room, the ridge, the dark tent, was as unattended as it felt. That praise offered where nobody claps is praise offered to no one.
This story cured me of that. Slowly.
Because if the mountain around Elisha was full of a host the boy could not see, then the mountain around me is not the vacant place my eyes report. The Scriptures are relentless about this — that we are surrounded, at every moment, by a reality thicker than the one our senses can measure. That there are more of them than of us. That the ministering hosts of heaven are not a poetic decoration on the faith but an actual, present, uncountable company, and that when a solitary heart lifts a song on a lonely height, it is not the only voice on that mountain. It never was.
The difference between the terrified boy and the calm prophet was not courage. It was vision. One of them could see the host and one of them could not, and they were standing in the exact same spot. The prophet was not braver. He was simply awake to what was already there.
Sing like it is full, because it is
So this is what I have learned to carry up the mountain, and what I want to hand to you if you are worshiping this morning in a room that feels empty, or fighting something that has you badly outnumbered, or standing on a height at dawn while the size of what is against you comes into terrible focus.
Ask for the other prayer. Not first for the army to leave — though you can ask that too — but first for your eyes. Open my eyes. Let me see the hill the way it actually is. Because the thing that will steady you is almost never a change in the odds on the ground. It is a change in what you can perceive of the odds in the air.
You are not singing into a vacant sky. You are adding your one voice to a host that has been holding the high ground since before you arrived. The praise you offer where no human hears it is not falling into emptiness; it is joining a company so vast it would stop your heart to see it whole. The hill is full. It has always been full. The chariots of fire do not go home when the crowd does.
And the God who filled that mountain around a frightened boy at Dothan, so that the enemy who came to take him left without him, is the same God standing in whatever surrounded place you woke up in this morning. He has not misjudged the numbers. Those who are with you are more than those who are against you.
Ask Him to open your eyes.
Then lift your voice, and sing like the hill is full — because it is.
