She may or she may not have been an Israelite. She may have been one of the seven thousand who had not bowed unto Baal, and possibly knew who it was who addressed her. At all events she must have heard of this “lighted fire-brand, fallen out of the clouds, and hurled by the hand of Jehovah” at the wicked Ahab. She may even have heard that in the midst of the drought Ahab had divided the country between himself and Obadiah, to seek if possible, amidst its former fountains and brooks a little “grass to save his horses and mules alive,” though it did not matter to this hardened wretch of a king if his subjects died by the thousands. So this demand of Elijah must have been a real trial to her faith. Nor did her distressed condition change the demand of the Tishbite. “Do as thou hast said,” he commanded, “but bake me a little cake first!” What, serve this stranger from Gilead before her starving child? Surely how could she, with her mother heart, obey such an order? But, noble woman, staggering under the request, she placed the gathered sticks on the fire, went to the barrel and took out the last handful of meal, and poured the last drop of oil from the cruse, and baked for God’s prophet the cake, and served him _first_! Was there ever such unselfish self-surrender? But for her poverty and her appearance, she might have passed for an angel who had strayed away from heaven, got caught in the famine and could not find her way back. If God had not been behind this exorbitant demand of the prophet it had been simply heartless. But, along with the demand were the words, “for the Lord God of Israel hath said it.” If God said it, that was the end of all questionings, this angel in human form, reduced in her poverty, staggered off to meet the demand. There may have been no small stir in heaven when it became known that she had gone to bake her last cake for the man of God, and then to die without tasting it herself. If the jasper walls had that moment let down around her, and all the glorified had gathered about that oven, she would have felt perfectly at home without a change of raiment. But that “last cake” was never baked. As the trembling widow stood by the heated oven, in sublime obedience to God’s requirement, even as Abraham once stood by his altar fires on Moriah, with the bound Isaac upon it, there came the gracious “_Fear not!_” She had gone to a point in her faith where God always breaks down. He saw it all, and out of divine compassion He answered, “The barrel of meal shall not waste, neither shall the cruse of oil fail, until the day that the Lord sendeth rain upon the earth.” And the record goes on to say that she, and the prophet, and her house, had enough through the years of the famine. There was so much meal and oil that even the widow’s poor and starving relations came to partake thereof. That is the way God blesses--it always overflows upon others.