She Said…

2 Samuel 14:13 …“Why don’t you do as much for the people of God as you have promised to do for me? You have convicted yourself in making this decision, because you have refused to bring home your own banished son. 14 All of us must die eventually. Our lives are like water spilled out on the ground, which cannot be gathered up again. But God does not just sweep life away; instead, he devises ways to bring us back when we have been separated from him. NLT

Joab enlisted a wise woman to confront the king about his reluctance to reunite with his own son.  The two things that informed my thoughts about this passage are the importance of, and the difficulty of, personal confrontation.  My own go-to plan is to avoid it.  It’s a ridiculous plan when I logically think about it because confrontation has played a very real part in my own life of faith but in the heat of the moment my response is just like the king’s – try to ignore and escape the situation and the other person involved as well.  It’s not a pretty picture but it’s a human response the Lord of Mercy has a plan for.   I’ve named it “the wisdom of mortality.”  

The wisdom of mortality is exactly what the woman of Tekoa  spoke. “Our lives are like water spilled out on the ground, which cannot be gathered up again.”  Life doesn’t last forever and that wisdom has made a big difference to me.   God has confronted us with our separation from Him through His son, Jesus.  The twists, turns and turmoil of life are the proof that we have cracks in our hearts of stone.  [v14b] “God does not just sweep life away; instead, he devises ways to bring us back when we have been separated from him.”  The wisdom of mortality is that it’s Christ Jesus that is our critical and visible evidence that we’ve been reunited with God.