There are days when nothing makes sense. The plan fell apart. The role you were filling has gone. The version of life you’d been carrying through the year has quietly collapsed, and you’re left wondering what on earth you’re doing here. What you don’t always realise, in the middle of those days, is that your bad day might be the gateway to someone else’s future.
Life isn’t just about us. We’re more interconnected, and more interdependent, than most of our self-help culture lets on. Sometimes the worst day of your life turns out to be a hinge for someone else’s whole story.
There’s a moment in the Old Testament that captures this beautifully.
Elijah in the cave
Elijah was one of the most significant prophets in Israel’s history. He served during the reign of King Ahab and Queen Jezebel in the 9th century BC, fearlessly opposing the worship of Baal and trying to call Israel back to Yahweh.
By 1 Kings 19, Elijah is having a genuinely terrible time. He’s exhausted. He believes he’s the last prophet left. His life is in danger. He’s run for the wilderness, found a cave, and crawled inside it to hide. He’s not in great shape, physically or spiritually.
That’s where God meets him. Not with a rebuke. With a question.
“What are you doing here, Elijah?” (1 Kings 19:9)
It’s a remarkable line. Not “what are you doing wrong?” Not “why have you given up?” Just a quiet, direct question that opens up space for Elijah to be honest about where he actually is.
Sometimes, in the worst stretches of our own lives, the question worth answering isn’t “how do I fix this?” It’s “what am I actually doing here, really?”
The bad day becomes a gateway
The strange thing is what happens next. God doesn’t tell Elijah to sort himself out. Instead, while Elijah is at his lowest point, God hands him a list of assignments. Anoint a new king of Syria. Anoint a new king of Israel. And, most importantly for what follows, find a young man called Elisha and pass on the prophetic mantle to him.
Notice what’s happening. Elijah’s worst day is the very moment that sets up Elisha’s entire future. The cave is the gateway. If Elijah hadn’t been broken enough to listen, the next chapter of someone else’s life wouldn’t have started.
That’s a humbling thought when you’re in your own version of the cave. The thing that feels like collapse may be quietly setting up someone else’s beginning.
Elisha at the plough
Elijah goes looking for Elisha and finds him exactly where God said he’d be. Not in a temple. Not in a study. Not in prayer. Ploughing a field, with twelve yoke of oxen in front of him.
Twelve yoke is significant. That’s a sizeable operation. Elisha wasn’t a struggling labourer. He was a man of means, with experience and substance. He had a comfortable, prosperous future already mapped out for him.
Elijah walks past and silently throws his cloak over Elisha’s shoulders. That’s the entire conversation. No speech. No interview. Just a gesture.
Elisha doesn’t hesitate. He runs after Elijah. He asks only for time to say goodbye to his parents.
Then comes the part of the story I find most striking.
Burning the plough
Elisha goes home, takes the oxen he’s been ploughing with, slaughters them, breaks the wooden ploughs into firewood, cooks the meat over the burning equipment, and feeds the meal to his neighbours.
Read that again. He destroys his entire previous livelihood. The animals, the ploughs, the future he could have fallen back on. All of it gone, in one deliberate afternoon. There’s no plan B. There’s no quiet land back home he can return to if Elijah’s prophet thing doesn’t work out. He has burned the safety net before he even left.
That’s how he enters the future.
Most of us, when we sense a new direction, try to extend the old one into it. We carry our oxen with us, just in case. We keep one foot in the past as we step into what’s next. The result is that our future becomes a slightly modified version of our past, when it might have been something completely different.
Elisha understood something we mostly miss. God never calls us into the past. He’s always calling us into the future. And the future requires letting go of the things we’ve been quietly counting on to fall back on.
The defining moment
The defining moments in our lives almost always come during disruptions. The seasons when, instead of clinging to security, we choose uncertainty. The bad days that become gateways. The cloaks thrown unexpectedly across our shoulders.
Three questions worth pausing on.
- What future is God showing you?
- Who is currently helping you find your way into it?
- What do you need to actually let go of to enter it properly?
That last question is the hardest. Because the things we cling to are usually the things that feel safest. The job we should have left years ago. The relationship that’s been over for a long time. The identity we built in our twenties that doesn’t fit anymore. The plan that we keep trying to extend, when something new is being offered.
The oxen and the ploughs have to go.
Burning the plough
If you’re in a cave right now, having one of those days where nothing seems to add up, it’s worth asking the question God put to Elijah. What are you doing here? Not as an accusation. As an invitation.
The cave isn’t always failure. Sometimes it’s the place where the next chapter starts. For you. And, more often than we realise, for someone else whose story is quietly waiting on what God is doing in you right now.
So if you knew, with confidence, that today’s worst feelings were preparing you for something or someone else’s future, what would you be willing to let burn behind you to step into it?