Open My Eyes

Elisha's servant wakes up early, steps outside, and freezes. An entire army has surrounded the city overnight, horses and chariots as far as he can see, and there is nowhere to run. He rushes back in and asks the question every one of us has asked at some point: "Oh no, my lord, what shall we do?" What strikes me about this story is that Elisha does not deny what the servant is seeing. He does not say, "Calm down, it's not that bad." He simply answers, "Do not be afraid. Those who are with us are more than those who are with them." Then he prays one of the shortest and most honest prayers in Scripture: open his eyes.

Most of us know that feeling of waking up to a situation that looks surrounded. Maybe it is the stack of assignments due before midterms, a friendship that quietly fell apart over the summer, a decision about a major or a job that has no clear answer, or a fear about your family back home that you carry alone because nobody around you seems to notice. The circumstances are real. Faith in Scripture never asks us to pretend the horses and chariots are not there.

What changes is not the army outside the city. What changes is what the servant is able to see. God does not remove the threat before he opens his servant's eyes to something else that was true the entire time, that he and Elisha were never actually alone. The fire and the horses of God's protection had been there all along, just outside of what the servant's eyes were trained to notice. Faith, in this story, looks less like optimism and more like a prayer for better eyesight.

This week, when you feel surrounded, try praying the servant's prayer instead of only praying for the problem to disappear. Ask God to open your eyes, not to what is not there, but to what is already true and you have not yet learned to see: his nearness, his people around you, the next faithful step in front of you. You may still walk out into the same circumstances tomorrow morning. But you will not walk out the same way.