Coupla Things

I'm generally not a 
meme sharer, but I did feel this one...

It has occurred to me that maybe more people would read my blog if the posts were shorter. I’m not sure why it matters to me how many hits I get or whatever, but it IS something I notice, sadly. Are my entries just too long and rambling and detailed and full of tangents and all that? Is reading one of them like spending 30 minutes listening to my son talk about the playground wars? Should I just make my point and get the hell out of Dodge?

David's motley crüe

I guess I could, but that wouldn’t really be me. No... long, rambling, detailed, full of tangents are definitely words I’d use to describe my thought processes. So… it’s like you’re just peeking into my head… for a while. 

That said… I thought I’d experiment with a shorter post… if nothing else, because I just wanted to point out a couple of things I tripped over in my “daily” Bible reading.

David and
Jonathan, BFFs

See, right now I’m in I Samuel, which tells the story of Samuel, Saul and David. Samuel was a prophet who had to anoint Israel’s first king. Saul was Israel’s first king, but before the oil was dry on his forehead, he messed up… “royally,” as they say. So Samuel is instructed by God to anoint David as king. The problem now is that Saul is still alive and royally pissed. He's always trying to nail David to the wall with a spear, so when David makes himself scarce Saul hunts him down like dog.

It’s at this point that the writer of Samuel mentions this little tidbit:  “All those who were in distress or in debt or discontented gathered around [David]…” (I Samuel 22: 2) I guess I noticed it because it went so beautifully with the previous post I wrote about Jesus being the King of Broken Hearts. I know David is NOT Jesus, but he’s sort of the prototype… One of the things the Jews said about the Messiah was that he would be the Son of David. And to be literal, he was actually one of David’s descendants – in addition to being the Messiah AKA the Son of David.

Bruce Cockburn knows
who Jesus came for!

There are plenty of things in David’s life that sort of pre-echo (I know that’s not a word or a thing, but it works for me here!) Jesus’s life… like his work as a shepherd, for instance.,, and the way he was rejected by his own family, and hunted down by the establishment... you get the picture.

So when I see this part about David attracting all the folks who are in distress and debt and all, well… I know that’s me. And it’s why I am attracted to Jesus, the friend of (according to Bruce Cockburn) “shepherds and street people, hookers and bums.” Because "The Son of Man [another of the Messiah's monikers] came to seek and to save the lost.” (Luke 9:10)

Okay, so moving right along… the next day I read something else that popped out at me. You see, in I Samuel 23, our hero David is still on the run from crazy King Saul when this happens: “And Saul’s son Jonathan went to David at Horesh and helped him find strength in God.” (v16) What I like about this is that it’s a great description of what I perceive my job as a friend to be. 

Haha! You're going to have to read the 
whole post and click on the link to 
find out what this has to do with anything!

When my friends are down, it’s not my job to fix everything, or to tell my freaked out friend, “You can do it!” Although this advice can be helpful in some cases (as in this charming song on a video that we bought my son when he was 2 – and if you neglect to click on this link, you will most assuredly be sorry), it still leaves the friend with the responsibility for “doing it.” 

Now, I don’t have anything at all against hard work. I mean, I do it sometimes. But I’m thinking that rather than telling my exhausted friend, “You can do it!”... if I'm going to be a good friend like Jonathan, I'll be saying “God can do it!” Because He can…. And that’s really what a desperate, in debt or discontented person needs to know.

(Okay, so... that wasn't so short. Maybe it's not in my skill set to be brief?)