In my opinion, God gave Elijah some weird orders: Run away, hide in a cave, drink from a brook, ravens will feed you! Then God sends him to a widow, with hardly any food saying: "Ask her to feed you."

God's ways are not like ours. God is creative, often turning hopeless into spectacular.

Do you find that just as one problem's fixed, another appears? This happens to Elijah. He's fed by ravens and then God miraculously reproduces the widow's last bit of food; then her son dies, great!

The widow turns on Elijah, blaming him because he was apparently: "exposing my sins, and killing my son"

Here's what happened:

Elijah...carried him up to the loft...laid him on his bed. He prayed, "O God, my God, why have you brought this terrible thing on this widow who has opened her home to me? Why have you killed her son?"

Three times he stretched himself out full-length on the boy, praying with all his might, "God, my God, put breath back into this boy's body!"

God listened to Elijah's prayer and put breath back into his body - he was alive! Elijah picked the boy up, carried him downstairs from the loft, and gave him to his mother. "Here's your son," said Elijah, "alive!"

The woman said to Elijah, "I see it all now - you are a holy man. When you speak, God speaks - a true word!" (1 Kings 17)

When things get bad we may shout: "Why!?" - But do we give up, or ask God to act, like Elijah did?

Some things in life look like mountains and we feel paralysed. With God there is always a way. It might be a weird way, one we do not understand, but there is a way. God can make our mountains like dust (Zechariah 4).

When healing, Jesus often touched people; he spat on the ground, making mud for healing blind eyes; sent people to particular places to get healed, when he was quite capable of doing it remotely. Perhaps we all need a point of contact, an act that releases God's power through us?

Wherever you are, whatever you are facing, go to God. Be honest. Surrender all you have to God, and ask for the Holy Spirit to fill you. Then see where God wants you to be.

Act; not by power or might, but by God's spirit. Do what God says, big or small, even if it seems weird!

The Word by Billy Evans, written by Sharron Hardwick.

New Life Christian Fellowship meet in Kilgetty Community Centre, 10.45 am on Sundays. Please call if you want someone to talk to or pray for you, tel. 01834 831533 or 07827 293781.