Bible Study: Making a Living

Extending our conversations that are scheduled for Wednesday nights, Thursday's blog will feature some of our thoughts and questions for reflection here. Scriptures are listed in Wednesday's blog (linked for your convenience). So feel free to share your thoughts here. (A brainstorm yesterday was figuring out a way to do this on-line live....ideas?)

First off some thoughts about the 2 Kings passage that talks about a widow in desperate financial straits. She comes to Elisha hoping for a solution to her debt and the story slowly, and oddly, unfolds. Elisha invites her to think about her most valuable commodity and then finds a way to turn that into a source of income that can help get her back on track. With this in mind, how do you view money and the thigns you own in your life? Does your money hinder or help you to trust God? (Do you trust God more when it seems you have lots of money and less when you have none? Or do you find yourself turning to God only when things are difficult?) Take some time to reflect on what you might be "low on" in your life (oil, money, love, patience, time, energy, work, friends, income, etc.). God uses the widow's limited resources in this story to solve her problem. What resource in your life might God use to provide for you? What is most difficult about trying to start out on your own once you leave for college, or even leave college to live by yourself?

Now on to the second reading which comes from Ephesians 4. Here Paul is writing from prison to a group of Christians that he had worked with earlier. There are obviously somethings going wrong there and Paul is trying to call them back together and get them on the right path. What do you see here that helps point toward creating unity in this group? (How might that help us at BTW?) Are there places in your life that you feel you are yet to live up to your "calling"? How can you work toward developing into the person God is calling you to be?

Deep questions for thought this week. And did anyone not sort of find it amusing that the widow has a gas shortage? Seems a bit funny given recent world events to read this story now, don't you think? Feel free to share what the 2 Kings story might have to say during the "world energy crisis".