The One About an Old King David, and Giving Our Worst Efforts to Our Best People
Dear West Family
This week I had the immense privilege of taking a couple of days out of the office to do some writing and thinking. I really don’t take that privilege lightly at all, and I am very thankful for the opportunity. I am thinking and writing (no surprises here) about the humanness of King David, and yes, I use the word “humanness” deliberately instead of the simpler “humanity” as I feel like it describes the complexities at play in the mix of David’s abundant virtues and undeniable vices in a fuller way that simply referencing him as part of a species.
David is fully human, and he is a human to the fullest. He experiences it all.
His life would make a brilliant long-form TV series that would make Game of Thrones seem positively believable and perhaps even modest in parts. I have had the time to read his entire story from start to finish a few times over this week, and it is astonishing in its totality, but I have been particularly focused over the last couple of days on David as an older man. The success of his life doesn’t allow him to escape the sadness of his long-term failures which become abundantly clear to him as an older man.
It seems we never really fully escape the shadows of our darkest days. We learn to live with them, and we rightly learn to right-size their view in light of Christ’s work for us, but we don’t forget, and we don’t miraculously get to walk in paths other than the ones we have worn for ourselves over decades.
It’s all very human.
It is life under the sun.
Thank God for His grace or the thought of it would make us all quite bleak (read Ecclesiastes for just how bleak.)
There is a moment in David’s older life that is etched in pain and full of wisdom and you can find it in 2 Samuel 19. David had experienced a particularly painful coup d'etat (I am not sure there are non-painful versions of those sorts of things) at the hands of his son, Absalom, and it had resulted in a period of fleeing for his life with his faithful family and friends while Absalom and his army sought to kill him. Absalom gets painfully caught out through his poor choice of warfare ready hairstyle and finds himself stuck in a tree by his hair, at which point, well-meaning servants of David kill him.
The coup is over. David’s legacy is secured. He can return to his rightful place as king.
But, David is mourning the loss of his beloved son. It is a very painful scene, deeply human in its complexity. We seldom experience only one emotion. Most things in life are a mix of sweet and bitter, regardless of what the two dimensional pretenses of our social media feeds might tell us.
It is in this moment that Joab (a very complex character who features prominently in David’s life and really has to put up with a lot of drama from the king) confronts David and says something that has been ringing in my head all week.
He says, “ … you love those who hate you and hate those who love you.” (2 Sam 19:6)
Well gosh, if that doesn’t describe a lot of my dysfunction, then I don’t know what does. Maybe you don’t identify with that sentiment with all the strength of emotion that is expressed through the highly volatile David, so let me say it another way that may resonate more.
You give your best to those who don’t care about you and you give your worst to those who do care about you deeply.
I have been deeply convicted by that this week. How much of our lives is spent giving the best of ourselves to people who don’t love us back, and who maybe aren’t even in our God-prescribed limited sphere of influence? Near strangers at work who we long to impress, people in casual social circles whose lives we covet deeply, people online who we don’t really know at all? And how much of our lives then ends up giving the people who love us the most, the very worst versions of ourselves?
I do this too much, too often, too repeatedly.
Friends, who has God put you right in front of you to love? Who really should be getting more of the best of you and a whole lot less of the worst of you? And on the flip side, who are you trying to get to love you that really isn’t supposed to be getting that much effort from you? We are called to love everybody, that is a given in Scripture, but I am not sure we are called to try and make sure that everyone in the world loves us back.
Are you a good steward of the close relationships that God has entrusted to you? Your family, your close friends, your church community. Do they get the best or the very worst? And I don’t mean best and worst in terms of appearances, but in terms of your full self. Your full, loving others with ferocity, even (and perhaps especially) with all of its undisguised warts, self.
Here’s the great news. God loves us at our worst, and he knows it all. There is no hiding or trying to impress. It’s incredible.
Now go be your best to those he has placed right in front of you.
I won’t see you this Sunday and I won’t be writing next Thursday as my family and I are heading out on vacation. Time to give them my fullest and my best, with God’s grace and help.One last thing. The song this week is from David Ramirez, and is a wonderfully simple and raw rendition of one of my favorite old hymns.
Press on,
Ross
