One of God’s least talked about miracles is his miracle of making an iron axe head float (2 Kings 6:1-7). The head accidentally becomes a mini-Titanic when a seminary student is using it to help build a dormitory. Somehow it flies off into a river and sinks. Since it’s a borrowed axe the situation’s as nerve-wracking as wrecking someone else’s car. The man tells Elisha what’s happened and shows him the scene of the accident. Elisha cuts a stick and tosses it in at that spot and voila! God makes the axe head float rise to the surface like champagne bubbles.
Compared to keeping Daniel from being the entrée on some hungry Lion’s menu or feeding five thousand people with a meal meant for one or two or raising Lazarus from the dead, making an iron ax head float’s as minor as sparkler next to a Fourth of July Roman Candle.
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Encouragement to Live as a Grace-Focused Optimist
But this minor miracle gives you three major lessons that encourage you to live as a Grace-Focused Optimist.
1. Major lesson one encouraging you to live as a Grace-Focused Optimist that this minor miracle gives you is the truth that God is willing to display his greatness in someone as ordinary as you.
Minor though this miracle is, it still displays the greatness of God just as a single shard of lightning displays his power. Notice the sky in which the lightning flashes. The man’s as ordinary as bark on a tree and green colored grass. We aren’t even told his name. Yet, he belongs to God and the God to whom he belongs is willing to show his greatness and goodness to him.
He’s willing to make axe heads float for you, too (1 Corinthians 1:26-31). He is willing to do for you “far more abundantly than you ask or think” (Ephesians 3:20). That’s what it means for you to say, “The Lord is my Shepherd” (Psalm 23:1). He’s as willing to display his greatness in your life as he is to display it in the life of any of his other children.
You can be a Grace-Focused Optimist about that.
2. Major lesson two encouraging you to live as a Grace-Focused Optimist that this minor miracle gives you is the truth that God loves working in even the little things of your every day living.
No doubt politics, natural disasters, and Special Prosecutor investigation stories were grabbing the attention of CNN and MSNBC and Fox News at the very moment the man’s axe head flew into the water. Compared to these things his problem was as trivial as the fall of a leaf on a windy day in New York’s Central Park. But it was big to him. So it was big to his heavenly Father!
Believer, what matters to you matters to your God! He urges you to ask him to help you in the smallest details of your life. He says, “In everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God” (Philippians 4:6). So you’ll get the point he repeats it: “Casting all your anxieties on him because he cares for you” (1 Peter 5:7). Even little things like driving safely to the Mall and untying a shoelace that’s Gordian knot tight concern him. Don’t allow a single ax head stay in the bottom of the river because you think it’s too small to bother the Father with. He says it’s no bother at all!
You can be a Grace-Focused Optimist about that.
3. Major lesson three encouraging you to live as a Grace-Focused Optimist that this minor miracle gives you is the truth it’s through showing his greatness in your ordinary life and its little things that God makes your life the adventure with him he wants it to be. An adventure’s “an exciting experience.”
We crave an adventurous life, don’t we? We go into a darkened theater and watch celluloid heroes live extraordinary lives so that for a few hours we can experience their excitement. Then the credits roll and we leave their Technicolor fantasies and return to the black and white realities of our ordinary lives. But God doesn’t want us to live mundane Christian lives. And we won’t if we remember that we belong to the Father who makes iron ax heads float for ordinary believers! Can you imagine how this man told this story later on? I bet he talked over and over about how the Lord worked for him.
God’s out to make us revel in him in a similar way. He’s out to fill our ordinary lives with floating axe head help. When you expect him to do this and ask him to do this, he does it! And when you begin experiencing him working in your life this way every day, all day long, your life will become the adventure with him he wants it to be.
You can be a Grace-Focused Optimist about that.
Not a bad way to live, huh?
