What Do I Do When the Thing God Promised Me Dies?

By Angela D. Thomas, DrPH, MPH, MBA

When the promise dies, you take it back to the place God gave it and you refuse to call it dead. You surrender the situation to God while you keep speaking well over it. Surrender isn't giving up. It's putting the dead thing in the only hands that can raise it.

So the Shunammite woman got her miracle. The son she was too scared to even hope for was born. And then one ordinary day, that boy grabbed his head, and by noon he was dead in her lap.

Read that again. The promise came true, and then the promise died. If you've lived any amount of life, you know that specific kind of grief. It's not the ache of never having it. It's the ache of finally holding it and watching it slip through your fingers. The marriage that finally happened. The baby that finally came. The dream job, the healing, the relationship that got restored. And then it flatlines.

She Refused to Announce the Death

Here's where this woman becomes my girl. She doesn't fall apart in the front yard. She picks up that dead boy and carries him up to the upper room, the exact room she'd built for the man of God, the place connected to where the word was first spoken. She lays him on the prophet's bed. Then she goes to find Elisha.

And when somebody stops her and asks if everything's okay, watch her mouth. 2 Kings 4:26 (NKJV) records it: "Is it well with you? Is it well with your husband? Is it well with the child?' And she answered, 'It is well.'"

It is well. With a dead child upstairs. Now hear me, she wasn't in denial and she wasn't faking. When she got to that prophet, she poured her whole raw soul out to him. But she would not let the word death be the last thing she spoke over her situation. Get that phrase in your vocabulary. It is well.

Why Would God Let the Promise Die First?

Because a surrendered thing and a dead thing aren't the same to God. Isaiah 55:11 (NKJV) says, "So shall My word be that goes forth from My mouth; It shall not return to Me void, But it shall accomplish what I please, And it shall prosper in the thing for which I sent it." His word doesn't return void. So if He said it, the death of it isn't the end of it.

Surrender is the move. You quit trying to do CPR on the situation with your own two hands, and you carry it back up to God and lay it down right where the promise was born. You speak life over the very thing everybody else is already burying.

Take this to the Word yourself. 2 Kings 4:18-28, Isaiah 55:11.

What This Means for You

What dead situation have you been announcing as over, and what would shift if you started saying it is well over it instead?

Yesterday we gave ourselves permission to want the promise. Today we learned to surrender it without cursing it. Next up, we get real specific about whose hands your situation actually belongs in, because that's where a lot of us lose the miracle.

I teach God's Word weekly inside the SheShed Community, and this is exactly the kind of teaching that hits different when you're in the room for it. The replay of this teaching, "Making Mad Moves," is available inside the community as well. Come sit with us.