[T]omorrow you and your sons shall be with me
Despite David sparing his life before, and despite Saul’s deep gratitude at being saved, he once again pursues David. David and his men find Saul sleeping and again David spares Saul’s life. He however steals Saul’s spear, and when Saul and his men awaken, explains that he’s spared his life again. In the meantime, David has left Israel to try to get out of Saul’s reach, and joined the Philistines. As the Philistines are preparing to fight Israel, Saul is afraid, fearing once again he’ll be destroyed. He seeks a medium who conjures up Samuel. Samuel tells Saul that because of his deep and persistent sin, the next day he and his sons will die, and join Samuel.
The accompanying reflection focuses on Saul given the fact that he’s just been told his sin will cost his life and the lives of his sons, and asks what I’d do to turn around great negative patterns in my life. Hmm.
I would hope that if I’d raised up a great man to be king who’d defeated Goliath, if I’d seen what Saul had seen, and been warned by God numerous times before, that I’d be able to identify my bad behavior, and stop it. I hope that I’d recognize that the stakes were high and very real. If I’d asked a medium about my future and my past mentor rose up and laid out my sins and explained I was going to die, that would be something to heed. But I haven’t had the same reminders of God’s wishes in my life. I would hope that if God was as clear with me as God was with Saul, I’d get the hint.
I don’t have the luxury of the same in-your-face God prompts as Saul. I need to seek and find them elsewhere. I need a human-scale model to help guide me and my behavior, to help correct the course when I’ve gone astray. I need Jesus.
When I study what Jesus did, said and asked of me, it becomes a little easier to navigate.
So back to the original question, what would I do to turn around negative patterns? First I’d have to constantly live in the presence and awareness of positive patterns. Without that, I might not recognize the negative ones. Ideally, I need a daily relationship with prayer and scripture and a community of faith. That helps me recognize negative patterns in me, because of the dissonance created between what I surround myself with, and what’s going on inside me. That’s when regular public confession of sin comes in for me. Once I see the negative thing in me, I can speak it out loud and seek the will and grace to stop. Every day if necessary. And once I recognize a negative pattern, I think I need to rely on those same things to help break the negative pattern, prayer, scripture and a community of faith full people.
Come to think of it, I think I’d rather have my experience and relationship of God and God’s prompts than Saul’s.
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