The Audacity to Ask for More

In 1948, a young Baptist preacher named Howard Thurman sat across from Mahatma Gandhi in his sparse ashram in Sevagram, India. Gandhi had spent decades pioneering nonviolent resistance. Thurman could have asked for a photograph, a blessing, or a simple word of encouragement. Instead, he asked Gandhi something breathtaking: "What message would you send to the American Negro?" He was asking for the transfer of a movement — not just inspiration, but the very methodology of liberation. Gandhi paused, then poured out his vision for how nonviolence could dismantle American racism. Thurman carried that conversation home like fire in his bones, and his writings became the intellectual kindling that shaped a young Martin Luther King Jr.

When Elisha walked beside Elijah on that final road to the Jordan, he could have asked for anything — protection, provision, a comfortable retirement from prophetic life. Instead, he made the most audacious request imaginable: "Let me inherit a double portion of your spirit." Not half. Not equal. Double. Elisha understood that the crises ahead would demand more than what had come before. He wasn't being greedy; he was being honest about the weight of the calling.

Some of us pray small prayers because we have forgotten the size of our God. Elisha reminds us that El Shaddai honors those who ask not out of ambition, but out of an unflinching awareness of what the work requires.