Take Heart! God Surrounds 2 Kings 6:8–17
Take Heart! God Surrounds
2 Kings 6:8–17
Rev. Dr. Rhonda Abbott Blevins
August 30, 2026
Once when the king of Aram was at war with Israel, he took counsel with his officers. He said, “At such and such a place shall be my camp.” But the man of God sent word to the king of Israel, “Take care not to pass this place, for the Arameans are going down there.” The king of Israel sent word to the place of which the man of God spoke. More than once or twice he warned a place so that it was on the alert. The mind of the king of Aram was greatly perturbed because of this; he called his officers and said to them, “Now tell me: Who among us is betraying us to the king of Israel?” Then one of his officers said, “No one, my lord king. It is Elisha, the prophet in Israel, who tells the king of Israel the words that you speak in your bedchamber.” He said, “Go and find where he is; I will send and seize him.” He was told, “He is in Dothan.” So he sent horses and chariots there and a great army; they came by night and surrounded the city. When an attendant of the man of God rose early in the morning and went out, an army with horses and chariots was all around the city. His servant said, “Alas, master! What shall we do?” He replied, “Do not be afraid, for there are more with us than there are with them.” Then Elisha prayed, “O Lord, please open his eyes that he may see.” So the Lord opened the eyes of the servant, and he saw; the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha.
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You may have heard a beautiful story from Native American lore about a particular coming-of-age rite for a young man.
A boy is on the edge of becoming a man. And on the appointed night, his father leads him deep into the forest , deeper than the boy has ever been, and sits him down on a stump, blindfolding him. The boy is given one instruction: stay until morning. Don’t cry out. Don’t take the blindfold off until you feel the sun come through it. If the boy makes it to morning following these instructions, in the morning, he’s a man.
The father leaves. The boy hears the footsteps walking away.
Can you imagine being that boy? Blindfolded, all alone in the middle of the forest at night? Twelve hours he must sit in that aloneness. Twelve hours he must sit in that darkness. Can you imagine how every crack of a branch would send shivers down his spine? Images of wolves surrounding him, bears looking for their next meal, venomous snakes slithering around underfoot . . . every gust of wind is something big moving closer. Blindfolded, unable to see anything. And the night goes on, and on and on. The longest night of this young man’s life. And he’s never been so along.
Then finally, morning comes. Dawn’s early light peeks through the fibers of the blindfold. The boy reaches up with stiff cold fingers and pulls it off.
And there, on the stump right just feet away, less than a stone’s throw from where he had been sitting all night long . . . his father. Watching over him. All. Night. Long.
The boy was never alone. Not for one minute of that long, dark night. He simply couldn’t see who was with him.
I invite you to hold on to that story as we go. We will find it an apt metaphor to hold alongside today’s scripture lesson in which a young man’s eyes were finally opened to Divine love and protection .
But first, let’s remember where we’ve been the past few weeks throughout this “Take Heart” series. Remember I drew that name straight from scripture. When you comb through everything Jesus says to frightened people (and he’s so often talking to frightened people) that’s the phrase he reaches for most. “Take heart.” And we’ve been learning, week by week, that courage is not a feeling. Never was. Courage is moving forward scared. Taking steps (in the words of theologian Paul Tillich) in spite of—in spite of our fear, our terror, our dread.
So listen to the sentence we’ve been building, one Sunday at a time.
· God shows up in the fourth watch of the night, on top of the water, while the storm’s still blowing.
· God goes with across every Jordan we face, close as breath.
· God sees two midwives an entire empire looked right past.
And today we add more of God’s activity: God shows up, God goes with, God sees.
Today we learn that God surrounds.
Second Kings, chapter six. Now, we don’t always expect this in 2 Kings, but there’s some wry humor in this passage.
The king of Aram (the bad guy) is at war with Israel, and he keeps setting these ambushes, these carefully considered, secret battle plans. And Israel keeps . . . not walking into them. Every single time. The king moves his camp; Israel avoids the spot. He sets a trap; nobody comes. And the man is losing his mind about it. He calls in his officers and demands to know: “Which one of you is the traitor? Who’s leaking to Israel?”
And one poor servant raises his hand to explain what’s happening to the powerful king. Nobody here is a traitor, sir. It’s the prophet. Elisha. He tells the king of Israel (I love how the text puts this) the words that you speak in your bedchamber.
Imagine King Aram getting that briefing. There is no mole, your majesty. There’s just a God who hears you, everywhere, and a preacher who’s listening to that God.
So what does the king of Aram do with this information? Does he reconsider his position? He does not. He sends an army. Horses, chariots. Verse 14 says “a great army.” They march all night and finally surround the little town of Dothan.
All of that to arrest one little preacher. It seems that it takes quite a lot of empire to stop one dude who listens to God.
Verse 15. (Keep in mind the story of the boy on the stump.) Elisha’s servant gets up early probably thinking about water jars and breakfast, ordinary Tuesday things. The servant steps outside, and it’s the end of the world. An army. A big, huge, powerful army. Everywhere he looks. He turns in a full circle, and it’s horses and chariots and spears all the way around. There is no way out. They are . . . surrounded.
And his cry (I know this prayer. I’ve prayed this prayer. Maybe you have too.) “What shall we do?”
Now watch Elisha. Because what he does next is everything.
Elisha doesn’t pull a sword. He doesn’t draw up a battle plan. He doesn’t lie to the kid: “aw, it’s probably not a whole army.” Elisha says the strangest, calmest sentence: Do not be afraid, for there are more with us than there are with them.
Can you imagine the servant’s confusion? He maybe tilts his neck, scratches his head, furrows his brow. Outside, there’s an ENTIRE ARMY. Thousands! Inside, looking around and counting . . . one, two. TWO of them. Has Elisha lost it?
And then Elisha prays. And listen to what he prays for. Not rescue. Not fire from heaven. Not even deliverance. He prays for his servant: O Lord, please open his eyes that he may see.
So the Lord opened the eyes of the servant, and he saw;
the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha.
Friends, pay attention to what did not happen in that verse. The Aramean army didn’t shrink. Not by one soldier. And the chariots of fire (I love this part!) the chariots did not arrive when Elisha prayed. They were already there. They’d been on that mountain all along. While the servant was pouring his coffee. While he was panicking. While he was counting enemies. The only thing that changed . . . the only thing . . . was his sight. Elisha’s sentence was true before the servant could see that it was true.
The blindfold came off. And the father was on the stump.
Now, some of you are thinking: preacher, that’s a nice story about eyes being opened, but I’ve never seen a chariot of fire in my life. That’s fair. So let me bring this closer to home. About twenty-five minutes from where you’re sitting, actually.
Just south of here in St. Pete, in the Salvador Dalí Museum, hangs one of Dalí’s giant masterworks. It’s called The Hallucinogenic Toreador. It’s enormous. Wall-sized. And when you walk up to it, here’s what you see: Venus. The famous statue, the classical one — repeated over and over across the canvas, red and green. A bullring around the edges. Some flies. Down in the corner, a little boy in a sailor suit, watching everything.
And here’s what most people do not see. Sometimes for a long, slightly embarrassing minute, while their spouse or friend is pointing and saying: “right THERE.”
The toreador. The bullfighter. He’s in the title of the painting, and people can’t find him. And friends, he is enormous . . . his face takes up half the canvas. The second Venus’s torso forms his nose and his chin. Her skirt is his shirt. The shadows between the figures make his eyes. There’s his necktie. He was in front of you the entire time, hiding in plain sight, built out of the very shapes you were already staring at.
But here’s the part I really want you to grasp: once you see him, you cannot unsee him. Can’t be done. You will never again stand in front of that canvas and find only Venus. Your eyes got opened once, and now the painting is permanently different. Actually, that’s not right, is it? The painting didn’t change at all. You did.
That’s what today’s scripture text wants to do to you. It wants to be your toreador. Because once you’ve looked back at some hard season of your life and suddenly seen it . . . the friend who called on exactly the right day, the strength that showed up from somewhere, the door that closed and saved you, the presence in the hospital room at 2 a.m. that you couldn’t explain then and can’t explain now . . . once you’ve seen the chariots that were around you the whole way through . . . you can’t unsee them. The world starts looking different after that. Not emptier. Fuller.
I want to talk about somebody who spent her whole life seeing it full.
This week the world lost Dolly Parton. Eighty years old. And y’all will have to forgive me, because this one’s personal . . . Dolly and I come from the same mountains. Where I grew up in East Tennessee, Dolly wasn’t a celebrity. I have called her the Patron Saint of East Tennessee. You see, as a young girl from the mountains of East Tennessee, Dolly was proof. Proof that a girl from a cabin in the hollers, one of twelve kids, dirt poor, could go as far in this world as anybody’s ever gone, and never once forget where she came from. Or Who brought her.
They made fun of her, you know. Early and often. Her look, her voice, her faith . . . all of it. She outlived every bit of that mockery with a grin and then built libraries for their grandchildren. A hundred million records sold, and somehow her biggest gift turned out to be free books for preschoolers. That’s courage with rhinestones on it, and I don’t know a better kind.
Back in 2019, Dolly recorded a song with Zach Williams which won them both a Grammy in gospel music. Listen to some of the lyrics:
Every time I tried to make it on my own,
Every time I tried to stand and start to fall,
And all those lonely roads that I have travelled on,
There was Jesus.
When the life I built came crashing to the ground,
When the friends I had were nowhere to be found,
I couldn't see it then but I can see it now,
There was Jesus.
In the waiting, in the searching,
In the healing and the hurting,
Like a blessing buried in the broken pieces,
Every minute‚ every moment,
Where I've been and where I'm going,
Even when I didn't know it or couldn't see it,
There was Jesus.
You hear what that song is doing? That’s the young boy sitting on the stump taking off the blindfold to find his loving father had watched over him during the long, dark night. That’s the prophet’s servant discovering God’s unseen chariots have been surrounding him the whole time. That’s a woman from the hills of Tennessee near the end of her life, looking back over her journey: the poverty, the losses, the hard nights, and seeing, now, Christ was standing in every one of those places the whole time. The presence didn’t arrive when she finally perceived it. It was there in the waiting. There in the searching. There all along.
Rest well, Dolly. I will always love you.
So here’s my question, and it’s the practical one. How do we live like the servant after verse 17? Because I don’t want to just visit that verse on a Sunday. I want to live in it. How does a person keep their eyes open?
The church has an old answer, and I mean old: you pray your eyes open. Daily. On purpose. Christians have been doing it for something like fifteen hundred years with a prayer attributed to St. Patrick. They call it his Breastplate, because you put it on in the morning. Like armor. Let’s pray it together:
Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ on my right, Christ on my left, Christ when I lie down, Christ when I sit down, Christ when I arise.
Do you see what that prayer is doing? Before me. Behind me. Beneath. Above. Right. Left. It’s drawing the circle. More than that, a three-dimensional sphere! It is the mountain full of chariots, prayed one direction at a time. And I’ll tell you something I believe with my whole heart: you cannot pray that prayer honestly, slowly, and still walk out the door convinced you’re surrounded by nothing but angry Arameans.
Here is your homework. (There will not be a quiz, but there will be a Monday!) Take that prayer home with you. Pray it every morning this week, at the coffee pot, in the car, out on your morning walk, I don’t care where. Say that prayer before you read the headlines, before the worries of the day catch up with you, before you think about your angry Arameans.
Open your eyes before you open your phone.
Let me take you back to the woods one last time.
Morning came. The blindfold came off. And the father had been on the next stump all night long.
Some of you are still in the night. I know it. Still blindfolded, still counting the noises, still doing the math on the army and coming up short. And I can’t tell you when your morning comes. I wish I could; I’d give a lot to be able to. But I can tell you what this text tells me: your not-seeing has never once . . . not once . . . meant that God wasn’t there. The chariots do not show up when you finally perceive them. They were on the mountain before you ever woke up afraid.
So take heart my dear friends! When your eyes are finally opened, you’ll get it. God surrounds you. Always has. Always will. You can take that to the bank. Even to your dark night of the soul.