Article September 13, 1919 ISSUE

The Shunammite Woman

MARY H. CUMMINS

The story of the Shunammite woman, as recorded in the fourth chapter of II Kings, is full of beauty and instruction to the Christian Scientist. This woman must have possessed some spiritual perception, else she would not have noticed the prophet Elisha, as he passed her house, and have invited him in to eat bread. Tarrying at her home for a brief rest, as he went to and fro on his journeyings, became a regular practice with the prophet, just as Christ Jesus loved to stop at the home of Mary and Martha at Bethany; and who can tell what these seasons of spiritual refreshment meant to the Shunammite as she listened to the words of truth from the lips of "the man of God"?

When the thought came to her of preparing "the little chamber on the wall," with its simple furnishings of "a bed, and a table, and a stool, and a candlestick," she, no doubt, never connected this act of disinterested ministration with the solving of her own problem, the fulfillment of her heart's desire. She may have given up all hope that her desire would ever be fulfilled, but this one act of unselfed love opened the way for the answer to her prayer. She must have grown to love that little room, where the promise was made which afterwards came true in her human experience, for we read that when her child died she took him up and laid him there, while she went out to find Elisha.

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