All Scriptures quoted are from The New Revised Standard Version unless otherwise quoted.

There is a tender scene in one of the last episodes of the blockbuster HBO series, “The Sopranos.” Tony Soprano, mob boss sociopath by day, husband and father by night, comes home in the middle of the day only to find his teenage son, A.J., trying to commit suicide by drowning himself in the family swimming pool. Fully clothed, Tony jumps into the freezing mid-winter pool and barely succeeds in saving his son. As they climb onto the side of pool, both grasping for every breath, A.J. begins weeping uncontrollably.

This was a desperate call for help from a young man who had lived his whole life dealing with the sometimes unbearable pressures any teen knows of trying to find his way in the real world with one exception. His real world pressures were squeezed on the other side by living the life of the son of a New Jersey mafia godfather. The pressure had become too much and A.J., suffering from clinical depression already, made a fairly decent attempt at escaping it all. His father, overwhelmed by the sudden onslaught of guilt and fear and anger, grabs his son out of the pool and yells at him, “What’s wrong with you?!” Then, becoming the tender father again, he cuddles his grown son in his lap and says, “That’s OK, baby. That’s OK, baby.”

It’s really difficult, standing on the outside of someone else’s pain, to understand the way they behave. Take Elijah, for example. By any standard, this man was clinically depressed. Who wouldn’t be? He’d been the one who had confronted the corrupt King of Israel, Ahab, for allowing his wife to pressure him into setting up temples to the false gods of Baal throughout the land, all but gutting the faith of the Jewish people. In other words, Elijah was just doing his job. More than that, he was just doing what he believed God had called him to do with his life. His reward for trying to do the right thing was to make Ahab’s wife, Jezebel, angry enough to put a bounty on his head.

In response to that threat, Elijah did what, to most people, might seem rather bizarre. He walked for an entire day out into the middle of nowhere until he found a tree just big enough for him to climb under, curled up like a wounded dog and just waited to die. He even prayed to God to take his life. “‘It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life . . ..’” Depression will do that to you. It will make you act in ways that to most people look downright silly, bizarre. Not many understand. But, thank God, God knows what it’s like to be that low.

God could have stopped by, grabbed Elijah by the nap of the neck, Tony Soprano-like, jerked him around and said, “What’s wrong with you?” You know, when life is falling apart, just get your act together! That’s all you need to do. Forget how you feel, or don’t feel, and just do the right thing! What’s wrong with you, anyway?!

Yet, the God who, some eight centuries later, would stoop down to humanity’s broken level through his son, Jesus, was showing what it was like to stoop that low already. Instead of jerking Elijah up like a stray cat and giving him a boot out the door, God instead stops by to offer a word of encouragement. Twice, God sends an angel with something for Elijah to eat. Twice, the Lord encourages Elijah just to take some nourishment so that he might have strength enough just to live another day. The God to whom Elijah had prayed for death came delivering a reason to live instead. That’s kind of the way God does things.

Someone has said that depression is anger turned inward. That has to be at least partly true here. Wouldn’t you have been angry, if you were Elijah? There is nothing more depressing than doing the right thing and then being threatened with your life for it. There is nothing that angers more than doing what you believe to be the will of God for your life, only to discover that doing the good thing doesn’t necessarily guarantee you anyone’s favor. Just ask Jesus, or, Elijah.

Indeed, the scripture is full, from cover to cover, of people whose life story is written by a similar script. There are more stories than not in the Bible of people who did the right thing, only to suffer for it.

We all love success stories, don’t we? We love to see good triumph over evil. Yet, despite the false inspiration of the full screen victories of imaginary heroes like Spiderman, the stories that inspire us the most are not those of success where people luck their way into or are born into it, like Prince William. He just turned twenty-five this week, inheriting a huge portion of his late mother’s estate and also finally reaching the age where he can choose any bride he wants without the queen’s permission. What a week! Yet, again, the stories of success that truly inspire us are not those of people who are born into success but who are birthed into it out of the nightmarish womb of great personal loss or tragedy or grief or even personal failure.

That will eventually become Elijah’s story. Maybe it will be yours or mine, too. But, do you think that Elijah, lying under that tree and praying to die, had any idea what God had in mind for him? Eight centuries later when God’s son, Jesus, was about to be crucified for doing the right thing, God surveyed heaven looking for someone to encourage Jesus. He found two people who had something very much in common, Moses and Elijah. Both of these men’s stories of success had been written on the parchment of personal tragedy. It was those two whom God chose to appear to Jesus during what we call the Transfiguration, not long before his crucifixion.

This, to me, is one of the best things about the Bible. We work so very hard at hiding our losses, covering our grief, disguising our weaknesses. Even when we do finally crawl to the church to make our confession of sin, we’ll allow our confession to only go so far and not one step more. The Bible, on the other hand, exposes the naked, raw humanity of one person after another who prove to us over and over and over again that the closer we get to our real humanity, our real brokenness, the less we hide, the closer we get to God. Even when we go into hiding, we shouldn’t be surprised when God comes seeking us out, to remind us of the life he has for us beyond the dark day in which we may find ourselves at any given moment.

I have had the privilege of getting reconnected with a very dear friend after several years. Dr. Clint Dunagan was one of my theology professors at Hardin-Simmons University. My senior year, I was privileged to serve on a faculty-student committee with him. I happened into Dr. Dunagan in the Student Center on the way to the meeting. We were a little early and he invited me to sit down for a Coke. It was over that Coke that I sat in stunned disbelief as he told me how, that very morning, his wife had left him. He told me with a candor and calmness I couldn’t believe. What I really couldn’t believe was that he had told me at all. I was a student. He was a much loved and respected professor. I might have thought he would tell a fellow faculty member his story, not me. I hadn’t even graduated, yet, much less earned the credentials to be my own professor’s priest in the confessional. He went on to tell me just a little of the marital struggles he had faced. No gory detail, no blaming, just simple facts.

Dr. Dunagan could not have known that day the role his honesty played in shaping my life, my theology and my ministry. I never learned more from anyone in all of college or seminary years than I did from him. What I learned, more than anything was this.

People don’t learn as much from our genius as they do our genuineness. They don’t learn as much from our answers as they do our willingness to admit our questions. Our witness is never more authentic than when people see us get close enough to our humanity that we wish we could die and then, by the grace of God, discover in our brokenness the God who helps us find a reason to keep living, just one more day.

There are times when, like Elijah, we will feel betrayed, even by God. There are times when it will appear that God’s presence from the earth has all but disappeared. Nobody ever said it better than did C.S. Lewis in his timeless classic, The Screwtape Letters. “Sooner or later (God) withdraws, if not in fact, at least from (our) conscious experience, all supports and incentives. (God) leaves (us) to stand up on (our) own legs – to carry out from the will alone all duties which have lost all relish. (God) wants (us) to learn to walk and must therefore take away his hand. (Satan’s) cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do (God’s) will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.”

Both Moses and Elijah knew what it was like to feel abandoned by God, and take one more step. There were no more perfect candidates to encourage Jesus when he most needed the strength to take one more step in a world from which it seemed, for a while, that God had abandoned him. It will not be the successes that come your way most easily, winning-the-Lottery-like, that encourage those around you, your friends, your spouse, your children or grandchildren. It will be the faith you still have when there is no logical explanation for it that makes the most lasting impression on those God has given you to watch you when they are looking for hope.

We will be faced with pressure-cooker situations and, just about the time we think we’re due some relief, someone will turn up the heat. Like the time you finally get your tax return and think you’re going to unload some pesky debt and, on the way to the bank to deposit the check your car breaks down and, low and behold, the repair costs just exactly what you got back from the IRS! There will be those times. When they come, we will be tempted to think that we only have two options, fight or flight. Elijah gives us reason to think again about a third alternative.

Each time he was as low as he could get, an angel appeared with food enough for the next step he needed. The third time he went into hiding, it was in cave. God called him out to see the storm of the millennium, mountain-splitting-rock-crushing wind, all of it followed by an earthquake and all of that followed by a fire, as though hell had broken lose on earth. Then, nothing. Just “a sheer sound of silence.” It was in the silence that Elijah finally heard the voice of God. A voice that simply said, “get up and just take one more step toward your calling.”

Sometimes, when are lost in weeping and depression, begging God for an answer or for death, the best thing we can do is stop crying out long enough to listen. Sometimes, the voice of God is not in words or sounds anyone else can hear, words only we can hear with the ears of our soul tuned to the sound of sheer silence.

Elijah could have gone back and taken on Ahab and Jezebel on his own terms. God had his plans for them, though. Elijah could have kept running and hiding. Instead, what he did was accept the simple provision of God’s hand for that day’s journey, and take the next step. He leaned into the purpose of God and an extremely important part of all of our faith journeys includes a chapter entitled, “Elijah.”

Two weeks after the shootings at Virginia Tech, Philip Yancey was asked to preach to the students. His words were nothing less than Spirit-inspired genius. Among the things he said was this. “I cannot say what I want to say, that this too shall pass. Instead, I point to the pain you feel, and will continue to feel, as a sign of life and love” (Philip Yancey, “Where Is God When It Hurts?,” Christianity Today, June 2007, p. 55). He went on to tell them not to numb their pain, not to run from it, but to listen to what it was telling them about how much they loved and how much they were still alive. He encouraged them to lean into their pain and to listen to it, then take the next step.

When Jesus healed the Gerasene man afflicted with scores of unnamed demons, he told him to go back to the very village that had ostracized him to a life of loneliness in the city cemetery and tell them of what he had learned through Jesus about his pain. God’s voice told Elijah, not to fight or fly, but to go back and take one more step toward his calling.

You may wish you could die today. There is a reason you are still alive. You may not feel like it. You may not have any answers. You may never have the answers to your most confusing questions. Go ahead and ask them anyway. Then, having asked them, maybe through torrential tears, through earthquake-like tremors of soul-shaking fear and fires of anxiety burning hell-hot through your mind and heart, stop and listen.

You may be forever changed by what you hear in the sound of sheer silence. Just listen. Listen.

What do you hear? Nothing? That’s good. Keep listening . . . to the silence.