Rizpah

Grant and I have been on vacation a lot this summer. It has been nice.

We visited with both of our families and spent some time at camp where we both had the opportunity to relax and re-coop from our daily madness in miami.

Now we are back and taking it one day at a time. At camp we re-discovered what it means to take things slow. And we got back into the swing of lots of prayer. When life gets crazy and frustrating it is easier to just go to sleep at night and sleep until the last second in the morning than to stay up or get up early and pray alone and together.

My brain reminded me that it is very typically human to want to hang out with someone we admire and love. Which means that I need to be spending more time in conversation with Jesus.

I discovered an amazing story in the Bible as I was preparing for camp. And surprisingly it is the story that seemed to most move the students (rising 6th graders).

The story of Rizpah is found in 2Samuel. David is king and he decideds to make ammends with this town called Gibeon. A long time before now, Saul and his family had broken a truce and murdered several men in Gibeon. Gibeon's been pissed for years and God is pissed because of what Saul did. So God keeps the fields dry until David asks why and God let's David know that the Gibeons deserve compensation for Saul's actions. David is like, 'Crap. This sucks.' But he knows what he has to do so he chooses 7 men from Saul's bloodline to hand over to the Gibeons. 2 of these men are sons of Rizpah and the other 5 are her nephews. Rizpah was Saul's concubine so her sons were considered lesser regarding familial inheritance. The Gibeons kill the men and display their bodies out on a hill where everyone can see them. Rizpah is devasted but she knows that she cannot remove the bodies and because of her status she cannot go straight to the king so she gets some black cloth and spreads it out near the bodies and she stays there. She stays through the harvest until the next rainy season began. She fights off the animals that come night and day to pick at the corpses. Finally David finds out what she's been doing and he agrees to properly bury the bodies. And once the bodies are buried, God blesses the land.

I give myself a week before I would have been sick and tired of the hot sun and the birds picking at me and the wild animals stalking me before I would have gone back to my home.

It is only with the amazing patience of God that a person could sacrifice so much and stay only in each day without worrying about the future, but only about what needs to be done now.

God, grant me the patience to pursue your will each day with the perserverance of Rizpah. Amen.