The Axe Head Floats 2 kings 6

An axe is used to work, to chop trees and cut them into pieces.
Elisha and the Prophets were travelling along the Jordan searching for some new, idyllic ground where they could build a place for them to live. Each was given or had taken an axe because each had to cut down a tree and make it into a pole to be used in the building.

Christians, priests and evangelists use axes to help build the Kingdom of God, using the Word of God in their preaching to the community around about them. They cut the dead wood and branches off them and make them into a sturdy pole for the Kingdom of God.
Suddenly an axe falls and sinks into the river. The prophet who was using it told Elisha that the axe head was borrowed.

1) The axe head is someone who preaches the word, but becomes burned out or becomes broken in their spirit and falls beneath the river, those about them, those in the community. Their presence within the community is diminished or even discarded or ignored. They sink in ineffectiveness, worry, accountability, integrity and collapse from being a pillar of the community.
Elisha collects a stick and plunging it into the river makes the axe head float. This fallen person needs a ‘crutch’ to help them back into being secure and confident once again. He needs to be taken out from under the river, back into the community, where through love, care and a sense of self-worth can once again transform them into being that effective worker for God they once was. Jesus is the ‘crutch’. Jesus is the one who can lift people out of the depths where they have sunken and bring them back as a new person to a better, effective life in the church and the community.

2) The axe head is someone who may be called a “Pseudo-Christian” - someone who knows the truth, who knows the Word of God, knows that Jesus has died for them, knows God loves them and is interested in them, but does not personally believe. Eventually the world would swallow up such a person because their effectiveness will not be much, they will not be as strong in preaching the Word of God or in evangelising and the temptations of the world will be too strong for them and eventually the ties to the Kingdom of God would break and they will fall into the temptations of the world and sink amongst the sin and desolateness of the world.
Once again only Jesus Christ is able to draw them out of the world and into the Kingdom of God, out of sin and into life, out of the desolateness and into effective working in the building of the Kingdom of God.
The axe head could have been a false prophet or someone using false doctrine which does not stand up in the work they are doing and it breaks.

3) The axe head was borrowed, so perhaps can be seen as someone from another community or country, a missionary, not used to this community, or culture who becomes perhaps overwhelmed with the circumstances of the work around them, the dreams of working for God not turning out as they would have wanted them to be, the hard tough work in just producing a small dent or chip in those people of the community may be too much to bear, the work which should have been considered easy, because God was meant to be behind it, is not as conveyed and so they break too soon, they sink in worry, grief, feelings of failure.