A headline caught me this week and I have not been able to set it down. Franklin Graham, speaking about the United Kingdom, says he is seeing pockets of revival — and points to Manchester, where more than eight hundred people turned to Christ.
It is the word pockets that keeps working on me. Not a wave. Not a nation turning overnight. Pockets. A room here. A campus there. A corner of a city where something is clearly happening that nobody organized and nobody can fully account for.
We tend to be disappointed by pockets. We want the map lit up. But when you read the Bible honestly, pockets are exactly how God has always done it.
The servant who had to look seven times
There is a scene at the end of 1 Kings 18 that I think about more than almost any other. Israel has been in drought for years. Elijah has just seen fire fall on Mount Carmel — the big, undeniable moment. And then he climbs to the top of the mountain, bows down with his face between his knees, and sends his servant to look toward the sea.
"Go and look toward the sea," he told his servant. And he went up and looked. "There is nothing there," he said. Seven times Elijah said, "Go back." The seventh time the servant reported, "A cloud as small as a man's hand is rising from the sea." So Elijah said, "Go and tell Ahab, 'Hitch up your chariot and go down before the rain stops you.'" Meanwhile, the sky grew black with clouds, the wind rose, a heavy rain started falling. (1 Kings 18:43-45)
Six times the answer was nothing. On the seventh, the whole thing the prophet had been praying for showed up in a shape you could hide behind your thumb. And Elijah did not say, "Well, that's a start." He said, get moving, the rain is coming. He knew what he was looking at.
That is the eye I want. Not the eye that waits for the sky to go black before it will believe anything is happening, but the eye that can spot a hand-sized cloud and recognize the weather in it.
Small is not the same as insignificant
Zechariah asked the question plainly: "Who dares despise the day of small things?" (Zechariah 4:10). Those words were spoken to people staring at a temple foundation that looked like nothing next to what they remembered. God did not tell them to stop noticing it was small. He told them not to despise it.
Here is the thing about pockets: you are standing in one, or you are near one, more often than you think. The Holy Spirit is not waiting for a stadium. He moves in a kitchen where a mother prays over a kid who is not speaking to her right now. He moves in a truck cab on US-31 where a man finally says out loud the thing he has never told anyone. He moves in a hospital room where somebody prays for healing and something eases that the chart cannot explain.
I watch it here. A person walks in guarded and closed up, and a few weeks later their face has changed and they cannot entirely tell you why. Somebody prays for a person they barely know and the words land with an accuracy they did not plan. That is not hype. That is a cloud the size of a hand, and I have learned to keep looking at the sea.
What this means for a Wednesday
Our Bible Study meets today at 11:30 in the morning — a modest number of us around tables in Ravenna on an ordinary October Wednesday. By any measure of scale, it is a pocket. And that is exactly the size God keeps choosing. Eight hundred in Manchester began with somebody willing to show up for twelve, and before that for two.
So I would gently encourage you: stop measuring whether God is at work by whether it has gotten big enough to notice. Go look toward the sea. Then go look again.
If you have looked six times and seen nothing
Some of you have. You have prayed for a marriage, a body, a son, a city, and the sky over your life is still clear and hot. I am not going to hand you a formula or tell you the rain is guaranteed by Friday. Elijah's servant came back six times with nothing, and he was not doing anything wrong.
What I will tell you is this: the One you are waiting on has already proven what He thinks of you. Jesus came down into the smallest possible pocket — a manger, a backwater town, twelve ordinary men — and from there He has never stopped moving. He is not far from your drought. Keep going back to the sea.
Join us this Sunday at 10:30am — Outpouring Worship Center, Ravenna.