The Parenthesis
Later on, in the third year of the drought, the Lord said to Elijah, “Go and present yourself to King Ahab. Tell him that I will soon send rain!” So Elijah went to appear before Ahab. Meanwhile, the famine had become very severe in Samaria. So Ahab summoned Obadiah, who was in charge of the palace. (Obadiah was a devoted follower of the Lord. Once when Jezebel had tried to kill all the Lord’s prophets, Obadiah had hidden 100 of them in two caves. He put fifty prophets in each cave and supplied them with food and water.) - 1 Kings 18:1–4 (NLT)
What is the one thing you would want people to say about you? A speaker I heard a few days ago posed that question, and she used a story to get there: a story about a Biblical character named Obadiah. What struck me was not only what Obadiah did. It was how he was described: not across paragraphs, but inside a single parenthesis, a passing aside tucked into the middle of the action. I’ll get to what that parenthesis actually said in a moment, but here is what I kept circling back to. If the story were about me, what would sit inside those parentheses? Would it be the wild uncertainty of my early years, the successes and failures that marked the middle, or whatever all of that adds up to now? The truth is that I don’t really know. That is probably a question better answered by the people who know me than by me. What they tell me is that I’m kind and loving, sometimes difficult to deal with, and always trying to do better.
You might expect the honest answer to be something like “a man of God.” I hope that is in there — I just do not get to write it myself. That’s the strange gift of a parenthesis. Nobody drafts it in advance. It is not a resume line or a eulogy we get to edit. It’s the detail someone slips in almost without thinking, because it is simply the truest thing they know about us, which is exactly what happens to Obadiah.
That is the scene above. A famine so severe that a desperate King Ahab sends his palace manager out just to search for grass to keep the royal horses alive. And it’s in the middle of that scramble that the story pauses to open Obadiah’s parenthesis: not a title, not a resume line, just the plain fact that he was a devoted follower of the Lord, and what that devotion had already cost him.
Notice where Obadiah is standing when we learn this about him. He is not in the wilderness with Elijah, leading a rebellion, or preaching to anyone. He is working inside Ahab’s palace. Inside the very government run by a king and queen who hated the God he served. That is an uncomfortable place to be devoted. It would have been easier to keep his head down, do the job, and let his faith stay private and safe. Instead, at real risk to his own life, he spent food, water, and secrecy on a hundred prophets nobody was watching him protect. No one commissioned that. No one was keeping score. It was just who he was when the room he stood in gave him every reason to be someone else.
Most of us are not choosing between Elijah’s mountaintop and Jezebel’s palace. We’re choosing something smaller and more frequent: whether we’re the same person in the meeting as we are in the parking lot afterward, whether we help someone when it costs us and nobody will ever know, whether the quiet parts of our week look anything like the parts other people can see. Nobody is writing our parenthesis in advance either. It gets written by whatever we keep doing when the stakes are personal and the audience is nobody.
Jesus said something similar about how His followers would actually be recognized. Not by a label they claimed for themselves, but by a pattern other people could see. “So now I am giving you a new commandment: Love each other. Just as I have loved you, you should love each other. Your love for one another will. rove to the world that you are my disciples.” (John 13:34–35, NLT) That is the same shape as Obadiah’s parenthesis showing proof lived out before it is ever spoken. If I want people to say I represent Christ, the evidence will not be in what I call myself. It will be in whether the people around me have been loved well.
I do not know yet what mine will say. I am not sure I’m supposed to know. What I can do is pay attention to what is forming in the meantime, which is the small, unglamorous, unrewarded choices that are quietly writing it whether I am watching or not.
If someone wrote a parenthesis about your life today, based only on what you do when no one is watching, what would it say? Where in your life right now are you being invited toward quiet, costly faithfulness rather than visible reward?
A Prayer
My prayer is we are thankful to God giving us stories like Obadiah who stayed faithful in hard, hidden places. We do not always know what our lives are writing when no one is watching. Help us live in a way that needs no explanation, devoted where it costs us, quiet where it counts. Shape the parenthesis of our lives into something that points to You. Amen.