Don’t Stop at Three

2 Kings 13:18

Then he said, "Take the arrows," and the king took them. Elisha told him, "Strike the ground." He struck it three times and stopped.

If you’re serious about piano playing, take the exercises seriously. Now I regret I didn’t. For ten semesters, I loathed doing scales and arpeggios. They’re tedious, boring, and seemingly irrelevant. My impatience cried for the real thing. If not for its inclusion in every  graded exam, my fingers wouldn’t spend a minute with those. Consistent with the ‘attitude’ was my disregard for the little numbers on top called fingering and the side sheets tagged Czerny and Hanon. I’ll give it three to five runs and I’m done. No wonder my music never took flight at all. It was my will blocking the freeway.

Amidst the instability of the northern kingdom, another bad news landed on King Jehoash’ lap: the prophet Elisha was dying.  The old man was his last thread connected to God.  He wept over him when he went down to see him. Maybe he felt that if the prophet dies, so will all hopes for Israel. Elisha assured him of God’s help through a symbolic act. He was asked to shoot an arrow eastward while those faint hands held his. After the shot, God’s victory was declared over the Arameans at Aphek. The limited scope was clue that it wasn’t complete deliverance yet. Elisha then told the king to take the arrows and strike the ground. He did it three times and stopped. Why did he? Did he feel silly doing it? Would an old man as serious as Elisha ever joke around in his deathbed?  Was he not able to connect they were still in the symbolical context? ‘You should have struck the ground five or six times; then you would have defeated Aram!’ were Elisha’s angry words. He was so disappointed in seeing his king, who minutes ago was weeping in despair but actually lacking in faith and zeal to do everything, even the meanest thing, for Israel.

If you have little oil in your house and God asked you to get all your neighbor’s empty jars for Him to fill it, will you do it? Will you really knock at every door or will you feel spiritual enough meeting Him halfway? How long to do you pray, or read your Bible, or exercise kindness? Do you stop at once a day? Max thrice? Who gave that limit? Oh, of course we have work to do and kids to attend to and lives to live. Don’t we all wake up in the morning, mindful of the long day ahead, struggling if we really have to spend minutes with God? We wonder how could our reading in Leviticus or Numbers be relevant at all. But feeling compelled to do it, yes we decide to sit down - - but we also made sure we’re on time for our next appointment. We say we need God’s power to survive the day and yet we stop at will for His disciplines seem too trivial, sometimes boring, and by world’s standard, silly. Now I wonder how many times we’re that close to His victories, but our wills stood in the way. If we trust Him enough to call the shots, let’s give Him our all ‘til He signals our stop.