Chapter Three: Exile of the Heart
I have learned that grief does not strike only once. It is a tide, returning again and again, sometimes gently, sometimes with the force to break a person open. When Eliab died—just as Elisha foretold—I did not wail. My eyes did not fill. For years I had mourned a husband who was still alive, mourning the closeness we had never truly shared, mourning the trust he had withheld from me, mourning the innocence that suspicion had stolen from our home. By the time his body grew still, my tears for him had already been shed in silence long before his final breath. Still, his death was a door closing behind me. A chapter ending. A weight shifting. But there was no time to linger in the echo of it.
Famine crept into the land like a thin shadow—silent, patient, merciless. The grass yellowed, the wells grew shallow, the animals weakened. The air itself felt starved. And every word Elisha had spoken pressed upon me like a command. Leave. Go. Save your son. So, I sold what I could—our tools, our spare linens, the jars of oil I had hoarded for lean months. The rest I left behind: the house, the fields, the chamber where a miracle had once breathed my son back into my arms. I left the memories too—some willingly, some clawing and screaming.
Ammiel walked beside me, small fingers wrapped around mine, clutching with the trust only a child can give. He did not understand the famine; he did not understand death; he did not understand why we must go. But he understood me—and that was enough.
"Will we come home?" he asked on the morning we set out, the sun just warming the horizon.
I lifted him onto the donkey and brushed a curl of hair from his forehead.
"Home is where God leads us," I whispered, because it was the only truth I could speak.
He nodded solemnly, though the words were too large for him to hold. We traveled north first, toward the coast, away from the spreading hunger. The air was cooler there, and the people kinder. They had not yet felt the worst of the famine. I bartered my cooking, my weaving, my ability to read faces quickly and speak gently.
Hospitality is its own currency; kindness buys survival. We settled for a time in the land of the Philistines—not comfortably, but safely. People often imagine exile as a wound, but in truth it is a series of smaller wounds—tiny cuts of displacement, misunderstanding, loneliness. I learned their customs. I learned their flavors and foods. I learned to lower my eyes at the right moments and raise them at others. And slowly, painfully, I learned that grief softens when one must work to stay alive. Ammiel grew. His legs lengthened. His laughter deepened. His eyes, those same dark, wondering eyes—saw everything.
He would sit near the edge of the village, watching the fishermen mend their nets. Sometimes he asked them questions; sometimes they answered, sometimes they told him to go. But his curiosity was relentless. One afternoon, as I repaired a tear in a borrowed garment, Ammiel came running to me, breathless, dirt on his hands, excitement in his voice.
"Mother! The sea goes on forever!" I looked up and smiled.
"So, it seems."
"Do you think God's voice can reach across it?"
"Yes," I said, threading the needle, "I think it can reach farther than that."
He plopped down beside me, swinging his legs.
"Then He'll always find us?"
The question pierced me. Children do not realize how deeply their words cut.
"Yes," I whispered, touching his cheek. "Even in exile."
He considered this, nodding slowly. Then, in a quieter voice:
"I hope Father hears Him too."
I froze. Ammiel rarely mentioned Eliab, but when he did it was always with a softness that hurt in ways I could not name.
"I think your father hears God perfectly now," I said gently. "Better than any of us."
As the years unfolded, I learned to live in that foreign land. I learned to let go of what once was and embrace what could be. But even in the busiest moments—even when laughter filled our small dwelling—there were nights when memory returned like a thief. Nights when I remembered carrying a lifeless child across my courtyard. Nights when I remembered Elisha's face as he declared life and doom in the same breath. Nights when I remembered Eliab staring at Ammiel as though the truth of the boy's existence was a riddle he would die trying to solve.
And there were nights when I wondered whether the famine had been punishment or mercy. Punishment for Eliab's silent doubt. Punishment for my fear. Punishment for daring to long for a child. Or mercy—for driving us away before something worse could happen, before bitterness could root itself too deeply in the soil of my home, before suspicion could poison Ammiel's childhood beyond healing. Perhaps it was both. Or neither. Perhaps God's mercy sometimes wears the face of loss.
Seven years passed. Seven years of growing, learning, surviving. Ammiel was no longer a child clinging to my hand, but a boy on the cusp of becoming a young man. His shoulders had broadened; his steps had become sure. And yet he still looked at me with the same devotion, the same trust. But seven years is a long time for land left behind. Long enough for crops to wither, for homes to collapse, for borders to shift, for people to forget the faces they once knew. Long enough for inheritance laws to entangle anyone who dared return. Still—the famine's end meant something equally important: It was time to go home.
"Mother," Ammiel asked one morning as we packed our belongings,
"Do you think our house still stands?"
"I do not know," I admitted.
"Will anyone remember us?"
"I do not know," I said again. He hesitated.
"Will God remember us there?"
I touched his chin, lifting his face toward mine.
"God never forgets His promises."
He smiled faintly.
"But His promises hurt sometimes." I exhaled.
"Yes. Sometimes they do."
The day we left the land of the Philistines; the sea was calm. I watched it one last time—its endless expanse, its shifting horizon. It had taught me something in our years near it—that vastness is not emptiness. That silence can be full. That survival is its own kind of worship. We turned our backs to it and began the long journey home.
My heart beat faster with every step. Not from fear. Not from excitement. But because part of me dreaded what waited in Shunem: the ghosts, the memories, the questions, the past I had never fully buried.
Ammiel walked beside me, taller now, stronger, more aware. I saw in him the traces of Eliab—the shape of his jaw, the curve of his shoulders—and the traces of myself. But above all, I saw the mark of the prophecy that had shaped his life long before he drew his first breath. He was a child of promise. A child of pain. A child of miraculous breath restored. As the road curved and the hills of my homeland rose in the distance, I felt a tremor of something I had not felt in years. Not fear. Not grief. Something else. Something ancient, fragile, and dangerous. Hope.