The Broom Tree

A man walked a full day past Beersheba, the last town at the bottom of the country, into the wilderness alone. He’d left his servant behind. He found a broom tree, a scrubby desert shrub that gives about as much shade as you’d expect, and he sat down under it and asked God to kill him.

It is enough; now, O LORD, take away my life; for I am not better than my fathers.

Then he lay down under the tree and went to sleep.

Not long before, he had called fire out of the sky in front of the whole nation.

It’s an odd place to find a prophet, and an odder time. Anyone who has finished something big and then gone flat, with no reason they could give to anybody, will know the timing when they see it. The win comes first. The broom tree comes after.

The win was on Mount Carmel, and it’s a set piece.

Elijah, one man, against four hundred and fifty prophets of Baal, in front of the people, in a drought he had announced himself three years earlier. Two altars. Two bulls. Whichever god answers by fire is God. The prophets of Baal went first and spent the day at it, shouting and dancing and cutting themselves, while Elijah stood by and mocked them. Cry louder. Maybe he’s busy. Maybe he’s on a trip. Maybe he’s asleep. Nothing came.

Then Elijah rebuilt his altar, dug a trench around it, and had them pour water over the whole thing three times until the trench was full. He prayed one short prayer. Fire fell and burned up the bull, the wood, the stones and the dust, and licked up the water in the trench. The people fell on their faces. The LORD, he is the God. The drought broke that same day. And Elijah, in the strangest detail of the story, tucked his cloak into his belt and outran the king’s chariot to Jezreel, something like seventeen miles, on foot, in the rain.

If you could design a day to prove you’d been right, that God was real and the years of work had been worth it, that was the day.

Then Queen Jezebel sent him a message. By this time tomorrow, she said, you’ll be as dead as my prophets.

One threat, from someone he’d already beaten. And the text says he was afraid, and ran for his life. He ran the length of the country to Beersheba, and then he kept going, and that’s where the broom tree was.

It makes very little sense, and the text doesn’t try to make it make sense. He’d won. Nothing had gone wrong. That isn’t a man who lost his faith. It’s a man who had spent everything he had, and the win took the last of it, and under the tree he found out there was nothing underneath.

What God did next isn’t what a religious person would predict.

No rebuke. No where is your faith. No speech about gratitude.

An angel touched him and said, Arise and eat. There was a cake baked on hot coals and a jar of water by his head. He ate and drank and lay back down.

Then the angel came a second time, touched him again, and said, Arise and eat; because the journey is too great for thee.

The journey is too great for you. That’s what was said to the man who’d just called down fire. Not you can do this. Not you’re stronger than you think. The opposite. It’s too much for you, so eat, and sleep, and eat again.

Food and sleep, twice, before a single word about anything else. Whatever was going on in Elijah’s spirit, and plenty was, God started with bread.

He walked forty days on that food to Horeb, the mountain of God, where Moses had stood. He went into a cave. And a question came to him there.

What doest thou here, Elijah?

Elijah gave the speech he’d been composing under the tree. I have been very jealous for the LORD. The people have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, killed your prophets with the sword. And I, even I only, am left, and they seek my life, to take it away.

I alone am left. It’s the sentence of somebody who has done the whole job by themselves for so long they can’t see anyone else in the room.

God didn’t argue. He told him to go stand on the mountain. A great wind tore at the rocks, and the LORD was not in the wind. Then an earthquake, and the LORD was not in the earthquake. Then a fire, and the LORD was not in the fire. The man who’d just called fire out of the sky watched a fire go by with nothing in it.

After the fire, a sound. The old translation says a still small voice. The Hebrew is closer to a thin silence, or the sound of a low whisper. Elijah wrapped his face in his cloak and went to the mouth of the cave.

And the same question came again. What doest thou here, Elijah? He gave the same speech, word for word. He hadn’t moved an inch.

So God gave him a list.

Go back the way you came. Anoint Hazael king over Syria. Anoint Jehu king over Israel. And anoint Elisha the son of Shaphat to be prophet in thy room. In your place.

The answer to I alone am left wasn’t a pep talk. It was a successor. And then the correction to the speech, almost in passing: I have left me seven thousand in Israel who never bowed to Baal. He had never been alone. He just couldn’t see them from under the tree.

He went and found Elisha plowing, twelve yoke of oxen ahead of him and Elisha with the last one, and threw his cloak over him. From there on, the story is mostly Elisha’s. What Elijah found on the mountain wasn’t a second wind. It was permission to hand it on.

The crash after the win is not failure. It’s the body telling the truth about what the win cost, and the answer to it in the text isn’t a rebuke but a meal. The body gets tended before the voice gets heard. Rest is the instruction, not the reward.

Where this meets your week

The broom tree rarely looks like a desert shrub, but it isn’t hard to recognize.

The flat after the finish. The company sold, or the last day of the job came with a cake and a few speeches, or the project you carried for years was finally done. People congratulated you. And a few weeks later you can’t make yourself go to the thing you said yes to, and you can’t explain why, because from the outside you won. Elijah asked to die right after the biggest day of his life. You aren’t ungrateful and you aren’t broken. You’re spent. Tell one person the plain version, I don’t know why I feel like this, and let them leave it unfixed.

The body before the big questions. The angel’s first two visits were bread and sleep, with nothing said about anything else. If your nights are broken and your meals are whatever’s within reach, prayer and planning won’t take hold yet. Give it two weeks: real sleep, real food, a walk in the morning, and a doctor’s visit if it’s been more than a year. That isn’t an indulgence. It’s the order the angel used, and it came before the mountain.

“I, even I only, am left.” Maybe you carried a congregation, a ministry or a volunteer program for decades, and then you retired from it. The phone that used to ring all day doesn’t. It’s easy to decide the whole thing rested on you and now nobody’s holding it. Elijah said that sentence twice, and the answer was seven thousand. Call one person from the old work this week. Not to be missed. To ask how they’re doing.

The loud hour. There’s an hour that used to be the busiest of your day and is now empty, and it gets filled with the news or the phone. The thin sound came after the wind, the earthquake and the fire had passed. Make that hour a walk with nothing in your ears. Not for exercise. For whatever is under the noise.

The text gives the order, and it’s a fair one for anybody a win has emptied out.

Eat and sleep first. Before you analyze what’s wrong with you, before you pray about it, before you decide anything, get a few nights of real sleep and eat real food. The journey is too great for you, and that isn’t a criticism.

Then listen. Not for the fire. You’ve had the fire. Sit somewhere quiet and find out whether there’s a thinner sound underneath it.

Then hand something on. Somebody is out plowing a field right now who could carry a piece of what you’ve been carrying alone. Give them one piece: a skill, a name, a warning. It won’t feel like a victory. It comes after the victory, and it’s the part that lasts.

Elisha didn’t just follow. He went back to his field first, killed a yoke of his oxen, cooked the meat over a fire built from the plowing gear, and gave it to the people, and they ate.

Then he got up and went after Elijah, and served him.

The first thing the new man did was set out a meal. The one who’d been fed under the broom tree wasn’t alone anymore, and someone else was doing the feeding.