Your Turn is Coming

While YOU were busy meeting everyone else's need, YOU quietly stopped expecting anyone to meet yours.

That is what happens to the givers. YOU are the one who shows up for people. YOU make room, YOU provide, YOU carry others — and YOU have done it so long and so faithfully that YOU have made peace with a quiet ache YOU rarely say out loud: there is something YOU have wanted, something YOU have needed, that YOU have stopped even asking God for. YOU figured it just was not going to happen for YOU. So YOU poured into everyone else and let YOUR own longing go silent.

2 Kings 4 is about a person exactly like that.

She was known for her generosity. She noticed a need, and she did more than notice it — she went out of her way, spent her own resources, and built something to bless someone who was doing God's work, expecting absolutely nothing in return. She was not serving to get. She was serving because that is who she was. And she had a private situation, a deep and long-carried disappointment, that she never once brought up.

Here is what most people miss.

While she was thinking about how to bless someone else, someone was thinking about how to bless her. Her kindness had been noticed — not just by the person she served, but by God Himself. And a question was quietly asked on her behalf: what can be done for her? What does she need? The very thing she had stopped asking for, the ache she had buried under years of serving others, was being brought up again — not by her, but on her behalf, in a room she was not even in.

She was thinking about others. God was thinking about her.

And what was spoken over her next addressed the exact thing she had given up on — the private longing she had carried in silence, the one she was too guarded to even hope for anymore. It was so specific, and so far beyond what she expected, that she almost could not receive it. Because when YOU have been the giver for that long, being on the receiving end of God's attention can be the hardest thing to believe.

There is something in this passage about what God does with the needs YOU have stopped voicing while YOU serve everyone else — and about how He brings up the very thing YOU buried — that will completely change how YOU see YOUR own season of pouring out.

What was the question asked on her behalf? What was the buried longing? And what does God do with the need YOU stopped asking Him for while YOU were busy helping everyone else?