Equipping young women professionals with young families to find fulfillment, contentment and joy as mothers and home makers without losing sight of who they are as women.

Volume 13, Issue 08: Extravagant Restoration

Until yesterday, I had been praying for something a certain way. Then I learnt that someone had made an appeal for me, and it led to an immediate shift in my prayer. As I started praying again later that day, the Lord brought to my mind a portion of Scripture from the Old Testament. My heart is so stirred up by the story in the eighth chapter of the second book of Kings.

The story starts a couple of chapters before. There was a Shunnamite woman married to an older man. She had no children. She was very hospitable to a prophet of God whenever he was in town. She even had a room built and furnished for him on her roof for his use whenever he was in town. After some time the prophet prayed for her and the Lord blessed her with a son, who later died but was brought back to life by the prophet.

The portion of the story that influenced the shift in my prayer was a time when years before, the prophet had told the Shunamite woman to leave the country with her family to go live someplace else. God had ordered a famine in the land that was going to last for seven years. She and her family left and lived as aliens in a foreign land for seven years.

When the seven years were up and the famine over, the woman and her family went back to their country. She went to see the king about getting back her home and farm. She happened to arrive before the king just as Gehazi - prophet Elisha 's servant, was telling the king about the time Elisha had brought a boy back to life, who happened to be the Shunamite woman's son.

After hearing the full story from the woman, the king assigned a high official to take care of her, saying, "Make sure she gets everything back that's hers, plus all the profits from the farm from the time she left until now." Another version says "The king directed one of his officials to see that everything she had lost was restored to her, including the value of any crops that had been harvested during her absence."

The Scriptures present this woman as a well-off woman. She probably had the means to purchase a new parcel of land and make a home anywhere in the country. But she wanted what was hers before she left. She wasn't interested in starting over.

Not only did the king direct that her land and home be restored back to her, he also instructed that all the income that had been generated from her farm from the time she left the country until the present time be given to her. What an extravagant restoration!

It wasn't enough that she gets her farm and home back, God wanted her to also have all the income that had been generated from her land while she was gone. Our God is a God of more than enough. He set out to be extravagantly generous with the Shunamite woman's restoration. What a showcase of His glory!

People may restore to you the bare minimum of what belonged to you. But not our God. He is not only a God of restoration, he is an extravagant restorer. In this story, He undertook to restore everything that belonged to the Shunamite woman, and then some.

Wouldn't you want to ask God to assign a high official to see to it that something that was once yours is restored to you, and then some? Make your appeal to Him. May He blow your mind and give you a personal story that mirrors that of the Shunamite woman.

“When the king asked the woman, she told him [everything]. So the king appointed for her a certain high official, saying, “Restore everything that was hers, including all the produce of the field since the day that she left the land until now.”” ‭‭2 Kings‬ ‭8:6‬ ‭AMP‬‬.

For His Glory,

Lillian Chebosi