On my desk there’s a photo I usually keep facedown. It shows our church plant’s launch team in my living room, our hands joined in prayer and our faces bright with anticipation—27 people who believed God had called us to something extraordinary. Three years of preparation, planning meetings, financial sacrifice, and kingdom-sized dreams captured in a single frame.
The man in that photo believed he had ministry figured out. He believed faithfulness plus hard work plus prayer equaled predictable kingdom results. He hadn’t yet watched his calling crumble in real time. He hadn’t sat in a cave, wrapped his cloak around his face, and begged God to let him die (1 Kings 19:4, 13).
I keep the photo facedown because in my darkest pastoral season, I couldn’t yet see what God was doing. He was accomplishing something in the darkness that couldn’t happen in the light. He was teaching me truths about his character that I could never learn from spiritual strength. He was revealing depths of his love visible only from the bottom of the pit.
If you’re reading this with discouragement pressing against your chest like a stone—if you’ve wondered whether you misheard God’s call or whether your ministry has become a cruel joke—then you need to meet Elijah again.
Not the Elijah of Mount Carmel who calls down fire and makes false prophets look foolish. That Elijah is the pastor we all want to be.
I’m talking about the other version of Elijah. The one under the broom tree. The one who runs from a queen’s threat right after witnessing the most spectacular move of God since Sinai.
The Elijah nobody talks about
Here’s what nobody tells you about ministry: You can believe in God’s sovereignty with your mind and still forget that the Lord is God when the messenger arrives with bad news. In 1 Kings 19, Elijah has just orchestrated Israel’s greatest spiritual victory since Moses. But when Jezebel threatens to have his head by sunrise, the prophet who called down fire and rain forgets every drop of theology he’s ever taught—and runs for his life.
His fear doesn’t come from weak faith. It comes from a broken heart. Elijah isn’t disillusioned because he stopped believing; he is undone because he has believed deeply, passionately, sacrificially. He has given everything to see the one thing he desires: for God to be glorified in Israel. He longs for conversion, repentance, revival. He wants to be the instrument God uses to bring it about.
Then Jezebel’s threat shatters those hopes. And his world collapses.
You know the feeling. You pray and preach your heart out, but your church hasn’t grown in years. You shepherd 65 people who argue about the fellowship-hall carpet while prosperity preachers fill arenas. You celebrate spiritual growth in a new congregant but grieve as your child walks away from the faith. Your wife loves Jesus, but she’s tired of sharing you with everyone else’s crises.
Elijah’s despair isn’t a weakness. It is the grief of a shattered dream. He forgets his own name—which means “Yahweh is my God”—along with the very message he wants Israel to embrace.
When God doesn’t give you what you want
So Elijah flees—then he hides in a cave at Mount Horeb, wanting to die. God meets him, but not the way you would expect. First comes a wind that shreds mountains. Then an earthquake that splits the earth. Then a fire that consumes everything in its path. It is exactly what Elijah has always wanted: a spectacular demonstration of God’s power that would compel Israel to believe.
But Elijah stays hidden. He no longer wants to see glory. His dreams lie around him, shattered like broken pottery.
Then comes a whisper. Elijah wraps his cloak around his face, shielding himself from the displays of glory. God speaks—not with consolation, as you’d expect, but with confrontation: What are you doing here? This isn’t where you’re supposed to be. I’ve got work for you.
Then comes what might be the hardest assignment any faithful servant has ever received: Go anoint a Syrian king, a godless Israelite ruler, and another prophet who will finish what you started. You’re not the one to bring the revival you longed for.
Those are crushing words for a man who has lived for one thing.
But here’s what I’ve learned in my own seasons of spiritual dryness and ministry disappointment:
When a voice whispers, “You should always have your heart’s desires,” you can be sure it speaks with a hiss from a forked tongue.
But when you hear, “That treasure you long for? You can’t have it—but I’ll give you me instead,” you can always trust where that voice comes from.
God will not let you preach a message you refuse to live. He loves you too much to leave your idols intact, even when those idols are good things like ministry success, church growth, or seeing your children follow Jesus.
The ruthless compassion of God
What happens to Elijah next reveals something stunning about God’s character. Even when God appears to be hard on his servants, his provision is staggeringly loving, generous, and kind.
How does Elijah’s story end? In 2 Kings 2, as he prepares to pass his mantle to Elisha, something extraordinary happens. Elisha asks for a “double portion” of Elijah’s spirit (v. 9). Elijah responds with a strange condition: “If you see me when I am taken from you, it will be yours—otherwise, it will not” (v. 10).
Then verse 11: “As they were walking along and talking together, suddenly a chariot of fire and horses of fire appeared and separated the two of them, and Elijah went up to heaven in a whirlwind.”
Do you see what God did? The man who was once so dead to hope that he couldn’t bear to look at God’s glory in the whirlwind is now ushered into glory—by a whirlwind and chariots of fire. God knows the deepest desires of his servants’ hearts. The one who takes Elijah home is worth infinitely more than anything he ever took away.
And still the story gets better. In Luke 9, Elijah appears again—this time on another mountain. Alongside Moses, he stares into the transfigured face of Christ. The man who begged to see God’s glory but was told no—and the man who didn’t want to see it at all—is now beholding the glory of God in the face of Jesus.
What the darkness teaches
In my darkest pastoral season, when my church plant collapsed before it even began—three years of preparation evaporating in a matter of weeks, 27 faithful people scattering to other congregations—I questioned everything I thought I knew about God’s calling. But I also learned something I could never have discovered in the light of success: that God’s love for me has nothing to do with my ministerial performance. I learned firsthand how he pursues his servants with ruthless compassion, stripping away everything we think we need so we can discover that he alone is enough.
The darkness redefined me, not as a successful planter or even a faithful pastor but as a beloved son. It taught me that the approval I’d been striving for was already mine in Christ—apart from any ministerial achievement.
Here’s what I couldn’t see while sitting in my own cave of discouragement: God was reshaping my vision, slowly and kindly. Through loss and limitation, he revealed aspects of his character I could never learn through seasons of spiritual strength. He was showing me depths of his love that become visible only from the bottom of the pit.
Every shepherd eventually faces a choice. We can fixate on the treasures we’ve lost—the ministries we dreamed of, the family lives we hoped for, the congregations that would hang on our every word—or we can discover that Jesus himself is the treasure that can never be taken.
The pastors who endure and thrive aren’t the ones who dodge disappointment. They’re the ones who keep limping forward, having learned that God’s grace is sufficient and his power is perfected in weakness. They’ve fixed their eyes on him, not on what might have been, as their ultimate treasure.
Missionary and martyr Jim Elliot said, “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.” I would only add, “Especially when what you cannot lose is God himself.”
The darkness has something to teach you that the light cannot. Don’t waste your cave season longing for Mount Carmel. Let God strip away your idols—even the “good” ones—until he alone is your vision, your treasure, and the satisfaction of your soul.
Thomas Anderson is the pastor of disciple making at Grace Community Church in Fulton, Maryland.
