the best help comes from the unexpected: 10th week tuesday II independence day 2012

Elijah was on the run trying to escape the anger of the king and our first reading today tells us that God told him to move to Zarephath because there is a widow there who will help him.  And so Elijah went probably hoping to find a widow rich enough to help him in his needs.  And what did he find?  A poor widow who could not even provide for herself and her son for their daily needs.  Ang ginpadala sang Dios nga mabulig kay Elias halos indi gani makapakaon sang iya anak sa sulod sang isa ka adlaw.  It must have been difficult for Elijah to understand this - this manner, this kind of divine providence.  In answer to your prayers, God sends you help through somebody who could hardly help herself. Elijah must have laughed a silent laugh, letting out a chuckle in amusement to this divine arrangement.  But that is how it is when you deal with God. 

Many times the best help comes from the most unexpected.   Most probably Elijah realized that if we want God to help us, then we have to permit him to help us and not insist in helping God help us.  Kon kaisa we teach God how to help us, we tell him how to answer our prayers, we tell him what to do to help us.  And so we call him God and treat him like our household help.  Here are two things I realize in this attitude of Elijah.

First, if we merely rely and thereby insist on what we think is best for us, if we rely merely on what we see as the better way to respond to a particular situation, if we insist on getting help from what we believe is the best source, we would end up frustrated.  I have come to realize that most often the best help is no help.  I have realized this when I was a seminarian when I have to learn to find a way out of my problems.  If my concept of help made me expect people to do things for me, if my concept of help made me insistent on retaining my convenience, or insistent on achieving things through effortless labor, then I would have never outgrown my childishness.  Looking back now I have come to realize that many times the best help is no help - that many times self-service is the best service - that supermoms and superdads may never make a superman.

Second, many times I feel that my prayers are unanswered because I expect God to help me in this manner, in this way, using this method, providing this kind of solution as I see fit.  But remember God is God, and precisely I call him God - he is the boss, he sees things from a bigger, a wider, from a much, much higher perspective, and for this God knows what is best, God knows my future, God knows my destiny.

We rely too much on our logic, on what we think is best, and how we calculate things will turn out.  But realize that our knowledge is limited, our efforts are wanting, and that our best effort may not always keep up.  See, Pacquiao lost, but I won because I bet on Bradley.  Who would ever expect that, they say, even Bradley himself did not.

If God would just answer our prayers the way we all want him to answer our prayers, the super lotto would be a failing venture, and PCSO would have scrapped it already because all of us would have won, because all of us have prayed to win.  But thank God that God is God - the totally other.  Many times the solution to our problems comes from the unexpected.  Like Elijah it can come from a widow who was as helpless as he was.  Do not lose trust when things like this happen to you as a result of your prayers and when things do not go as planned or as expected.

Today we celebrate our independence day.  May our country prosper with the help that comes from God, learning that many times we have to rely on the foolishness of our faith rather than the logic of our intellect.