Healing Like Rain

The Lord is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and rich in love. The Lord is good to all; he has compassion for all he has made (Psalm 145 v.8-9)

Healing is like rain. What I mean to say is that healing is the product of  the showers of truth. When we allow light and truth to enter our hearts, healing is the result. I have discovered recently that the torrential thunderstorms of life that I tried to avoid, in reality, brought the best crops of restoration, joy, and peace in my life.

Healing comes in the unsettled ways live reaches us: death, relocation, new job, and separation from my family and home. I know because all these things hit my life.  I uprooted myself from everything I had a new call to move to South Africa. I had a call I was to begin a journey, a supposed adventure but it was at the cost of the familiar.

What began as an adventure turned out to be one of the hardest things I’ve ever experienced? I left my classroom of 10 years, my home of 10 years, and my family. Nothing stays the same. Neither people nor places. So, when I returned I was hit with a full storm of emotions: who was I? Where did I belong? How would I or could fit into two worlds? The deluge of coming home to what was not really my home anymore and saying associates and students who no longer associates was more than unnerving. Add to that my church closed the same month I came home.  The deluge seemed ready to sink my craft. Bolts of lightning and frightening rumbles of terrible thunder rocked my world as relationships came unglued and the support I thought would be forthcoming did not appear. Luckily, my small boat was tied to a larger one whose Guide is God.

In the midst of this storm, there was a pilot on the boat next to. He pulled my small ship closer to his larger one and I grabbed the ladder that he had thrown overboard and quietly gathered the strength to enter into his boat. There his gentle ministrations brought healing to my chafed spirit and soul: un-dealt with issues, unmet desires, unhealed hurts. All these rivulets of scars He healed with His tender attentions.

Hebrews 12 states no discipline seems pleasant at the time but it achieves a harvest of righteousness for those who are trained by. That difficult season in my life has produced a firm foundation. I trust completely in God to captain by ship. I do not rely on men to do what only God can, and I resolutely know that no matter many storms hit my life,  He will bring my safely to harbor. Psalm 145: 17: God is just in all his ways; and is kind in all he does. If I did not believe that, I would have given up a long time ago.  Meditate on these promises from Psalm 145: “The Lord upholds all those who fall down and lifts all who were bowed down (v.14). “The Lord is near to all who call on him to all who call on him in truth. He fulfills the desires of those who fear him; he hears their cry and saves them" (v.18-19).

I pray that no matter what storms hit your life; you will not get out of the boat with Jesus -even if he is sleeping in the stern. One cry from your voice will awaken and will speak Peace to you and the storm, If He doesn’t quiet the storm outside of you, He will quiet the one within, just as he did for me.

Standing under the umbrella of Grace.

MJ

 

The Ten Forgotten Virgins

We talk about the Twenty Virgins: Ten Foolish and Ten Wise. But there is a forgotten story of ten other virgins. We know them as concubines, not quite wives, but not really whores. Who were these women? Like all women, they began as virgins. They were likely the daughters of kings, royalty in reality, but they ended their days as witless victims to a man’s lust or greed of power. I take my story from a small segment found in the book of Kings, Embattled King David is forced to flee Jerusalem as his son, Absalom, attempts a coup d’état. In his wake, he leaves ten concubines and their children to guard the palace and its belongings. One has to wonder what David was thinking.

Absalom said to Ahithophel, “Give us your advice. What should we do?” Ahithophel answered, “Sleep with your father’s concubines whom he left to take care of the palace. Then all Israel will hear that you have made yourself obnoxious to your father, and the hands of everyone with you will be more resolute.” So they pitched a tent for Absalom on the roof, and he slept with his father’s concubines in the sight of all Israel. Now in those days the advice Ahithophel gave was like that of one who inquires of God. That was how both David and Absalom regarded all of Ahithophel advice. (2 Samuel 16:20-23).

Absalom’s decision came from tradition; it was a conventionally Eastern idea. The grossest insult that one could offered to a king, and that a king a father, would be to lie with his wives and concubines, and this choice would strengthen the breach between David and Absalom.

 It was irreparable; it was vain to hope for any reconciliation. We talk of David and Absalom, Joab and Ahithophel; yet, few wonder, however, what happened to the ten concubines that were left behind. In scripture, they appear to be merely glossed over. Certainly, the Bible scholar is little concerned with their fate. Humiliation. Shame. Degradation.

 

 When the famous king is forced to leave Jerusalem with his wives, concubines, and children, it  is a day of great sadness. Indeed, it is a day of great shame. Critics speak of David’s humiliation but what of that of the women? To be taken, one after another and used, and then tossed away. Was it not bad enough to be left behind in Jerusalem, not taken with the rest of the king’s entourage? But now to add insult to injury, they are to be raped by the king’s son in view of all of  Jerusalem. Public Humiliation. Lest we imagine ourselves any better, when a rape victim is tried in the papers or it is suggested that she invited the abuse, we assume the same posture as those who stood that day and watched Absalom go in and lay with his father’s concubines.

 Ahithophel, one of David’s trusted counselors, advises Absalom to put up a tent of the place roof and publically humiliate his father be having intercourse with his concubines. Why is it that a woman seems to be voiceless at these times? Where were the voices that said, “do not do this thing? If not for the rape of your own sister, Tamar, do not do this thing. Do not use women like your brother Amnon used your sister Tamar and then discarded her. She had no place to go from her shame, these women will neither.”

No, but Absalom is furious; he has held his anger and grievance over David’s lack of action over his sister’s rape for almost ten years. For two years, he waited and plotted the murder of his brother Amnon. After the assassination, which he did during a pretext of throwing a party to which he invited his brothers, he fled to his mother’s country where he remained for three years. When he returned to Jerusalem, he was not greeted by his father for another two years.  Finally, he spent four years plotting his rebellion. Eleven years has passed for him to build up his rage; it must be spent.

At least someone grieved over Tamar; who grieved over these women? Did they cry together as they tried to wipe the shame away as they did the tears? They were now one flesh with father and son. They shared pain now on a deeper level, adding to their sense of rejection and humiliation.

One incident of rape had such great ramifications that it is hard to believe that we believe that there will be not cataclysmic effects for us in this generation. Like David, we are truly asleep at the wheel.

P.S.

Those ten concubines had no more choice in having sex with Absalom then Bathsheba with David. That would be akin to saying a serf or slave girl had a choice in having sex with her master. In fact, most feudal landlords and slave masters considered it their right to deflower a peasant or slave girl.

Still Ruminating,

MJ