The Proud General Who Dipped Seven Times

There was a man named Naaman, and almost everyone was a little afraid of him.

He was a great general. He won the battles. He wore the shining armor, and kings stood up when he walked into the room. If you had seen him, you would have thought: there is a man who has everything.

But under that shining armor, his skin was sick. A spreading, scaly sickness that no doctor could touch. All his winning could not heal one inch of it. The strongest man in the kingdom could not fix the smallest thing.

It was a little girl who knew the way.

A servant girl, far from home, taken away in a war. She could have kept what she knew to herself. But she looked at the great general, and she felt sorry for him. "If only he would go to the prophet in my country," she said. "God could make him well."

So Naaman went. Chariots and horses and bags of gold, all the way to the door of God's prophet, Elisha.

Elisha did not even come outside.

He sent a messenger with a tiny errand. Go and wash in the Jordan River. Dip down seven times. That is all.

Naaman was furious.

He had pictured something grand. The prophet stepping out, waving his hand, saying mighty words over a mighty man. Wash in that muddy little river? With everyone watching? He turned his chariot around to go home sick rather than do something so small.

But his servants came close, and they said it gently. "Father. If he had asked you to do something hard, you would have done it. Why not the easy thing? Why not just wash?"

That was the hardest part for Naaman: not the washing, but the bending down and letting himself be small.

Yet he climbed down. He stepped into the brown water, the very river that had opened for Elisha when he struck it with Elijah's fallen cloak. He went under once. Twice. Still sick. A third time, a fourth, a fifth. The great general, dipping like a little child in the shallows. Six times. And the seventh time he came up, and his skin was new. Soft as a baby's. Clean.

He had carried gold to buy his healing. None of it worked. He only had to go down low, and let God do the thing he could never do himself.

Naaman was not even one of God's own people. He came from far away, an outsider, a stranger. And God bent down to wash him anyway.

Because there was Someone coming who would do exactly this. Someone who would not stay shut behind a grand door. He would come all the way out to the muddy edges, to the strangers and the proud and the sick, and kneel down low himself. He would wash people clean, not with river water this time, but with his own love poured all the way out.

And the kingdom he was bringing would be a turned-around place. The great become small. The outsider is welcomed in. The unlikeliest people, from every far country, gathered into one family.

Naaman rode home with new skin and a new heart, telling everyone he met that the God of Israel was the true God. And at that turned-around table, a place is set with your name on it.