I Wanted Something Grander

He wanted it to be worthy of the thing.

That is the honest shape of it, and it took him years to see, and when he did see it he was embarrassed for about a fortnight and then relieved.

He had a real trouble. Not a small one, and not the kind you fix by cheering up. And what he wanted, without ever saying it, was a response proportionate to the size of it.

Something that felt like an answer. A weight to match the weight.

So when people suggested small things he was polite and did none of them. Sit down for ten minutes. Have some breakfast. Ring your brother. Go and stand outside for a bit.

He was not being difficult. Every one of those sounded, against the actual size of what he was carrying, like being offered a plaster for a broken leg. And he had enough dignity left to be insulted by it.

Nine months of that.

Then one Saturday he was standing at the sink filling a glass, and his hands were under the tap, and he was too tired to be anything, and he stood there for a while longer than he needed to with the water running over his wrists.

And something in him unclenched about a quarter of an inch.

He was furious about it, actually, for a good hour afterward.

So let me ask you.

What have you refused because it looked too small to be the answer?

He went away angry and he was right to

There is a general in Second Kings who is one of the most sympathetic men in the Old Testament, and the reason is that his reaction is exactly yours.

He is a commander. He arrives with horses and chariots and a great deal of silver, at the door of a prophet, carrying a disease that is ending him.

And the prophet does not even come out. He sends a messenger with an instruction, and the instruction is to go and wash seven times in the local river, which is a muddy brown thing that Naaman has already compared unfavorably to the rivers back home.

He goes away angry. The text says so plainly.

And then his servants talk him round, and this happens.

So he went down and dipped himself in the Jordan seven times, as the man of God had told him, and his flesh was restored and became clean like that of a young boy.2 Kings 5:14

Second Kings 5 puts the whole restoration inside an act so plain it insulted him, and the Spirit who moved the prophets to speak did not require the method to match the weight of the problem, so you have never once been owed a grand answer as a condition of being met.

Now hear what the passage does not do, because this is where people get careless.

It does not say the river was magic. It does not say muddy water is better than clean. It makes no claim about the properties of anything at all, and I am not going to make one either, in any direction, about any object anybody has ever argued about.

What it says is that a man with a real problem was given a small physical thing to do, and did it, and something happened.

His anger was not stupid. That is the part I want you to keep. His sense of proportion was working perfectly. The gap between the size of his trouble and the size of the instruction was real, and he was right that it was real, and he was wrong about what the gap meant.

Second Kings 5 has him healed on the seventh dip in a river he had already insulted, and the Spirit was in the small thing rather than in the size of it, which is why the story survives.