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2Ki1 (/) Oh the faithlessness of this one defenestrated: we need not be. Of swearing at speed bumps and such, apt are we to self-justify self-pity, in the face of misfortune we deceive ourselves, believing God owes us, believing that victims of fate, of singleness, of genetic predisposition, of exhaustion, are exempt from idolatry prohibitions. Lovers we are free indeed to face all of life.

2Ki2-3 Elisha & Avoidance. Why? Some things are too painful, sometimes words are not enough. I need wisdom in when to speak & when not. 3v7 a sort of inversion of Ruth1's “you...I” with an “I...you”, ways we hide our will to power maybe. These superstitious kings; I feel now, bodily, the tension of hope for things & the god who is not this slot machine, God is not subject to my demands. But god heals infertile waters & fills valleys with water. This is an easy thing in the eyes of the Lord. Easy. Oh.

2Ki4-5 Is all well? There are no minor miracles and there are no occasions which cannot be reordered so to make explicit God's character. We are those artists charged to live with Elijian allusivity to demonstrate to a watching world the God who makes all things amazing. .. There is a connection between a culture of debt and the constraints on having/retaining children. God comes to break that, God comes to be known by breaking that. .. As Naaman. Be baptised. Be not proud. Be baptised as this is no mere ritual, v13 this is to do with Being. v14 So we must come as a child, so supernaturally to then be like a child, reborn. v17 Soil's significance relates us back to 1Ki8 and the value of place: revelation is still now limited, nodal and specific. v26 I have accepted money and garments in exchange for the employment of my God-given gifts. Oh hired hands, how can we but be?

2Ki6-7 God is all about us. Open my eyes, open our eyes. God is for us & not far from us. There is a cosmic battle, and God is all about us in strength. Praying in hope, in the tension of a world where some are fed by ravens and some eat their own children. A call to pray, a call to serve. & 7v9 a call to share good news. It cannot be kept to ourselves.

2Ki8-9 Frequently baffling. .. Why, of what cause, to what end, does the king restore the Shunammite woman's land? Except to image the Grace that promises any who have left houses brothers and all of Mk10v29? At a stretch, she is a woman previously of means who left it all in faithful obedience, but. Better that she were one without 4v8's history, that this might be a simpler mercy-justice less obscured by notions of reward. Anyways. We are London, many a sojourner's Philistia, many a sojourner's return. So grace them. .. 8v12 Arbitrary pronouns (Elisha is him and/or he) draw attention to the Look which elicits a pained shame felt here for all human brokeness? .. Ch9's stealth truthers, ninja annointers, are hard to apply, outside afghanistan. Perhaps there is a time and a place for such covert evangelism, eschat burglars speaking the truth in gloves. Breaking in to break through to difficult people.

2Ki10-11 Elijah and Jehu both bring to an end Baal worship, but differently. How do we compare them, what can we learn? I'm not sure of the answer, to think on. With Athaliah the promises of God to the line of David seem dead, dissolved, disappointed. A seeming betrayal of promise a time we are apt to doubt God's power, reality or care. But divine plans, seeds, hibinating child-kings we be led out, to new proclaimings, annointings, shouts of life. Let us take heart that God is steadfast & surprising, let us not give up when the solution cannot be seen by our eyes.

2Ki12-13 Lukewarmth is twice indicted, convictingly. First, the priests. We lose architectural embellishment to embezzlement: the life less decorated is a loss lost to squandering middlemen. We are middlemen. We are stewards and architecture-which-delights is but the canary in the stewardship coal mine. Unanswered, “Why are you not repairing the house?” Oh let us not eat because this is not working. Second, Joash. Shoot for the stars, with both barrels, on all cylinders. Let us with enthusiastic obedience and obedient enthusiasm go and Ecc9v10 and Col 3v23 and. God desires that we 'make an end of it', seeing things through, finishing well. Our life of limited ambition: we do not have because we do not ask. (Third) imagine a world without accountants. Such a world is possible 12v15.

2Ki14-15 These histories remind of our throwness, that we all have our genealogies, and we may do as our parents have done. But we are not judged for our parents' choices, we are judged for our own. And this is somehow how it is, our freedom withint throwness, God knows what we are rightly accountable for and what we are not. So choose well. This is not an atheist's existentialism but an acknowledgement of the God of the possible, the God of collaborative redemption.

2Ki16-17 How do you measure an idol? How should I measure my idols? Working backwards from these archetypally extreme examples in search of their constituent parts: 1. 16v3 Child sacrifice. My idolatry shows in my taking power over the powerless, denying the gift of gift, making expendable the sacred, searing my conscience in displays of misallegiance. 2. 16v10 Building altars. Symptomed here in the monkey-see-monkey-do mimicry of modelling duplicate altars, a formalist trusting in the magic of space/shape to save us, uncreative and destructive refashionings of the previously sufficient, previously sacred. 3. 17v7 Exile. While we are not culpably killed for our parents' sin, we do exist in a sea of systemic sin visited on from preceding generations. If the church is estranged, if we build houses only to not live in them, if we plant trees only to not eat their fruit, then ours is an exile? Of idolatry?

2Ki18-19 Destroying the bronze snake, a symbollic way of distancing from old faith, now deepened? Is there a healthy way of getting rid of habits of old faith? As I sort through old bits of paper, it all to be remembered or should some prayers be forgotten? Freedom & determinism again, ridding oneself of things from the past a way of declaring that our past is not our sole determiner? .. Do you think your words can replace military force? Maybe they always could. Hezekiah manifestly behaves differently because there is a God. Faithfully turning to prayer amidst discouragers discouragement. A confidence in God unlike Senna's confidence in himself. Take Hezekiah's story of faith this morning, it is for today. Come to the God who is real with your petitions.

2Ki20-21 Hezekiah, in search of lost time seeks a sign's sign, a miracle's premiracle. Why? Bear with me. BBC's Page Eight illustrated a sort of freedom which comes from 'living in injury time', but. We can out-do even this moribund heroism.. Promised a bulletproof 15 years, how would you then live? 1Cor15v55 with a Groundhog Day's generous zest for life? As HudsonT, premiracles enable us to live miracle-predicated dangerous lives, to risk marriage, to cross oceans, to lead others on faith-basedly financed mission. Alaz Hez wastes his borrowed time building bigger barns and Israel promptly returns to infanticide upon his demise, so my being-unto excursion lacks a tidy conclusion. Perhaps reading this sign episode as a flashback pre-Senna we can claim he did some miraculous good from this premiracle.. Oh lovers, know beyond knowing that you are loved, and so risk.

2Ki22-23 Knowledge makes us more accountable. God speaks when you read. With great education, insight, prophecy, comes great responsibility. God, seeking your revelation, know that it will have to change how we exist. Josiah the little-known hero of faith. It is altars & not just idols that are in need of tearing down. What are my pagan altars? All that facilitates iol worship..habits, places, material things, ways of engaging people, other. Let us covenant with God together, let us passover celebrate.

2Ki24-25 Idolatry leads to ruin. What is idolatry? The lie that you can have God-and. Polygamy's cake had and eaten. Schaeffer's synthesis. If you are fickle with God you will be fickle in all of life, short-termist, spread thin, fleetingly fashionable, second-handing, people-pleasing, double-minded, hollowed-out, in idolatry we are our own undoing. In believing we can serve God and serve idols we do not serve God. We become false 17v15. Note how Judah sides with Babylon, then Egypt, then Babylon. Either and any. God desires our unfickle affection, and desires that we image infickelity in all of life. .. If our living hope within is ailing, it is perhaps advised to clear out our incense bowls and sacred crockery which disguise our sickness. And in this sense there is hope in the purge wrought by Babylon. God is working for God's glory, God is working out a saving in all we see. So hope we.

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1Ki1-2 Old elders and the interregnum quandry of who and how. David, as senility saps his virility, knows not and knows not what, and so our baffled king gives way to the hallelujah chorus.

1Ki3 Another much recounted tale that we would seek to make enfleshed today. God is so big and powerful, asking him to make me wiser, make me better, it is a terrifying prayer to pray. Make us better, remake us. Solomon's wisdom here demonstrated to be married to compassion. Seek wisdom for compassion today, for that which will confront you, for surely it will.

1Ki4-5 Wisdom is. Wisdom is from God 5v12. Wisdom is for worship 5v7. Wisdom is in the trees 4v33. Wisdom sings 4v32. Wisdom is breadth, wisdom is depth 4v29. Wisdom cooks on a rota, but more than that, wisdom begets structures, timetables and delegation with the purpose of the dissemination of wisdom: wisdom works out wise ways of making wisdom widespread. And then cathedrals. 4v20 By social justice cathedrals are built. And of wisdom-wrought peacetime. Why war we, this nation at war knows not, as David knew not.

1Ki6-7 So architecture yeah, full of the redundant detail and careful making you hope that we would better notice, enjoy, experience as worship. Tell me, how does this compare with what you hope for, with Huram the bronzesmith known by Solomon & invited to play. What can we learn? Building, dwelling..the dwelling of God. God in buildings. Most Holy Places. If Christ tears down the curtain, prayer is ceaseless &everything is spiritual, are there no more most holy places? A well trod question, the answer is probably yes and no? But what does that mean for buildings, & what for the way we spend today's time?

1Ki6-7 Oh happy the architecture of happiness. Holy Places Are. And today they are not less nodal, the happening of holiness is not less placed, but it is as if the one greenhouse, that jewish prototyping workshop, has been flung open, and spores as mustard seedlings there germinated as little mysteries for long ages are now blown on the Spirit's wind to entemple the cracks of the world, to renature the voids. Berry speaks of 'no unholy places, but sacred places and desecrated places.” thither go we to entemple.

1Ki8-9 Let us benedict out houses thus, that God's eyes would see us in 24/7 prayer, v29. .. Praying towards a place, can we consider this unsuperstitiously? Perhaps contrasting it with 9v8. We live publicly; our temples and our homes and our bodies are the storefronts to the goodlife, windows to the soul. So comport oneself with a conspicuous orientation that acknowledges what God has consecrated and where. That our entempled landscape might not become enruined by our incorrigible forgetfulness.

1Ki10-11 Knowledge for knowledge's sake is never enough aye, even it if is a good. Wisdom without faithfulness is dead. What are my hundred idol-worshipping wives in my life? What increases to steal me from God without my noticing? What & who's influence?

1Ki12 My little finger. A timely moment of happy house escapism last night saw Casino Royale. A worthless film. But one which quips this exact euphemistic boasting. What are we to make of this Kinsey fashioned Carry On Kinging sort of school boyish laddery? While easily we could leap from the heavy yolks here to our new King whose yolk is easy, perhaps we would miss an intermediary. We do not merely exchange yolks but paradigms. The paradigm here represented in the dick+whip combination is a carrot+stick model of leadership built on marketing+legislation: promising all the sexual potency of bus ads and commanding the injurious retribution of mortgage holders' commuter hours. This blind boasting+striving begets the crescendo of sex+violence which issues the collapse of such an empire on those built. So. Jesus' servant leadership is not merely lighterly burdened, but rather is another game altogether. So we, Rm3v27, 2Cor 11v30.

1Ki13 Truth and lies innit. Lying in the name of God, lying for the sake of a perceived good, lying in order to offer hospitality. Lying is always the manifestation of an attitude that we know better than God. There are truths & there are falsehoods, & Good is God, God knows the secret things, God will expose lies with true truth. In an aching for truth is a gladness that I will be judged.. Truth will win so tell the truth. Truth & conviction: do not be led from God's voice by others, not even by your elders, not even by prophets. & of letting anyone be priests as the 'fatal sin' in my version – this is not the priesthood of all believers but a disbelief disvalue of truth.

1Ki14-15 A study in the theme of the masquerading, charading, pantomiming, pretend-to-be-my-sistering all through the OT would not be unprofitable. And we find ourselves in this: all the ways we seize our facticities with both hands, taking power to manufacture identity, to closet our shame. This because we fear 'unbearable news', this because we know how far we have lied and accordingly how very overdue we are to meet a lion in the road. We hide from an angry God who isn't, we sin striving to fight a fight that has already been won and to become a beloved which we already are. Let's not... So, in this line of bad kings, Asa is notable for his prudent dependence and seeking of peace through a gift economy. Let's.

1Ki16-17 The return to an endless cycle of kingly rebellion is somehow more painful after David's story. The front to back reading that gives more context to David makes clearer why he is so held up as aman after God's heart. To be so tangibly distinctive & Godly...we should seek psalmic honest intimacy with a God who would make us such. Elijah comes into thoughts about trusting God for money, trusting God for all provision & then to raise the dead. I remember a prayer over me last year, before I know where money would come from, that I would be fed by ravens, & so it has been. God remind us teach us what it is to trust in provision & how you would have us do that in this season. Please provide what we need, & bring. the dead. to life. Help me to mean it, help me to see it, help me to participate.

1Ki18-19 Much too much in this bumper issue. Obadiah our ecologist demonstrates a right fear of God that is prophet-feeding and creation caring .. Know that truth-tellers qua truth-tellers will be known as troublers. In such contexts as we are each called to make God conspicuous we should seek that sort of triply saturated soaking such that the fire which consumes us would be God alone .. Under our broom tree: if we have been fed by ravens, if we have seen the fire and felt the rain. How is it that we, as Elijah, still haemorrhage faith? Drenching is an opportunity, in our wet weakness God is strong.

1Ki20-21 I don't know how to apply this to our mercy justice mercy justice, how best to read it through an NT lens.. Like the Arameans I let God be the God of the hills & not the valleys, quick to compartmentalise, dichotomise, rationalise. Forgive me, come & be God. God of the valleys. Advice to a sullen king: a Satrean self-assertion that could be a popular self-help. These are not God's ways.

1Ki22 Here how we, like these, hate those who speak to us the hard prophecies. And so homogeneously we huddle, huddled amongst those who tell us the 'peace, peace' we want to hear. .. Here how we really do hope our masks will save us, and so, overboldly, into battle to a disguised demise, with our papier mache identity impotent against the slings and arrows. So how should we properly prepare and protect? Unsure, but by a right fear of God and a speaking plainly of the enemy who is there. (/)

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2Sm1-2 I find myself taking for granted the strength of the grace with which David comports himself towards Saul, even after death, that and/by his total conviction in God's active explicit anointing. Initially and still uncommentrarily confused: Saul died falling on his sword, only later, leaning on his spear he was euthanised by this mercy killer? All is not fair in war, and love's lost here against one unforgiven who, as an Amalekite, may have known not what he was doing? Living by the sword: is this dramatic prose a celebration of violence or? Yet should we celebrate the spiritually skillful, writing reading biographies of those who have lived by the Eph6:17 sword, dramatically.

2Sm3-5 Hope fulfilled is a tree of life, says Prov13v12. We talk a lot about hope, hope for the very big & the very small, each day trees of life as well as waiting's heartsickness. This was David's biggest hope finally fulfilled, becoming king. The promise of anointing way back when, followed by persecution. & here it is, a longing fulfilled. Everything is different, & also it's business as usual. Promises fulfilled among blood & politics & decisions to be made. So every tree of life. Let us not romanticise God. As with all romanticising it will come to steal true romance.

2Sm6-7 Oh Uzziah. God will be met. God will be met on his terms, or punishment or consequences will thus be meted. Under Waterloo Bridge this evening was a clarinet, and passing pausing a group with a three-year-old leaping and dancing to the jazz, all head over hands happy. Leaping and dancing because we are free, free to seem a fool and be despised. Oh how we the dancing generation fall short. Houses yeh, there is a king, there is a kingdom and there will come a time you'll see, when housebuilders will not break your heart. 7v10 Dwell. Let us glimmer a picture of this for all to hope by.

2Sm8-9 Much in this ancient Hebrew worldview I struggle to enter into, even imaginatively, but here is something to make real – David asks who he can show kindness to. This is a prayer to start the morning. Yesterday, half-resigned to it being a personless bubble of a day I asked God that someone would disturb me with some need, & so it was. Intentionally, pray this: who can I show kindness to today? Then see it, then be kind. Every small kindness has currency in this kingdom, I might just believe it.

2Sm10-11 Of beards and the hearsay of illadvisors, how should we then fight? As sources of conflict abound in this world, how can we but, how can we not? There is something in both these chapters against sending others to fight in your stead, the Ammonite stirrers sending mercenary hired hands, and David sending Uriah. .. Lust here is not minor fall but a major drift. How do we try to rinse/deflect/atone our home sins on foreign battlefields? Where is the cost of our shame paid abroad? Do not deal in shame, don't import it, don't export, don't propagate it. Jesus has set you free so be free. .. And don't shave men's beards?

2Sm12 What do I covet? Whose only lamb do I steal from a place of plenty? The fact that I can't immediately answer this question suggests that I, like David, don't know myself well enough, don't feel my sin acutely enough. For a Nathan's analogising that my eyes might be opened that the repentant road be taken. Of David's prayers for his son's life, a between place, a grey place, a difficult place.. Might we take from this passage that between places qua their betweeness offer a unique opportunity for a particular kind of conversation with God, of fasting, weeping & lying on the floor. An urgency, intensity & intentionality of prayer which breeds intimacy with God. Questions are what we do when we don't know, seeking is what we do when we don't have. Such times are holy.

2Sm13-14 13v21 Bad men who previously did bad things can say and do nothing when their bad sons consult bad friends to plot bad things. Lust's major drift steers its mess into the next generation and on Amnon.. Unleashed lust cannot be undone: a failure in sexual restraint will render you voiceless to restrain worse excesses by those who follow from you. So, true love, for their sake, waits. 14v19 'on me be the guilt..' and the cost of active parenting.. Still bemused by irrelevant aesthetic qualifications. And weighing hair. Srsly.

2Sm15 The servant king on the mount of olives, returning the will to power with grace upon grace. Jesus. Jesus. We will go with you wherever you go.

2Sm16-17 In these rooftop sexual politics lust's mess ploughs on, the messers becoming the messees. Our enemy today is not impersonal as they would have us believe, we do not battle merely the inevitable force of market forces and the heartless, mindless evolution of cruel determinism. Our reality remains one of persons persuadable saveable. Ours is still a contest against Absaloms. Have we an ear behind those enemy lines? Have we a plan? Have we a trust in God? Have we a cross-country, joined-up, hands-on eagerly anticipated sense that we are participating in the restoration of God's true king? Your work, dear one, is important and excellent: idea's consequences: the gift to fight for the right view of God, for a knowledge of his present presences, known and spoken, is yours.

2Sm18-19 Do we construct our lives, motives, battles on such a basis as Absalom: do we gather sympathisers to an antihero-ic and react-ive cause borne of begrudged grievance? We are yet forgiveable. Forgiveable, mourned for and longed for by God as/if/even/when we, entangled by our pride, die on that battlefield. .. Do we seek to restore peace and unity? Even as a smaller side, fear not, the v8 forest is for us. .. Mercy takes v14 time, oh that we might waste some in saving lives today. .. Of 19, a sort of hug-a-hoodie lesson in the hows of peace-making? Unsure. Certainly we are all guilty at such riotous times, as now, even of negligence, even of inaction. Humbly let us out-reach the sceptics in our outreach.

2Sm20-21 If David is our Christ figure, Joab consistently evokes the name of David to justify his own agenda, but fails to listen. Let us agenda surrender. 21v1-4 justice? really? v15-22 slaying giants, a different picture to 1Sm17, a David dependent on the help of others, as we, this week.

2Sm22-23 Whether or not God is in the earthquake, his still small voice will come, untimeably as an earthquake, even ruinously to the landscape of our presuppositions. .. Of the spatiality of distress, and its opposite, a trust in God: 22v20 'broad space' 1Sm30v6 (lit.) 'the matter is narrow for.' Faithless ways I dig myself into a hole reveal my flight from God as a kind of agrophobia. .. Mighty men: 23v20, Mt12v1-8, 1Sm21. We are chosen and purposed like this, as David's men, as Jesus' disciples, to go into tight spaces and fight lions on snowy days, to defend lentils. What a calling.

2Sm24 Initially confused as to David's sin, the 1Chr21 version tells us that it was Satan not God who moved David to take the census. A mistranslated ambiguous indexical maybe, but it puts me in mind of the fear and trembling I feel on thinking that Satan used scripture to tempt Jesus in the wilderness, & discernment is a weighty game. As David here, as Jesus, our conscience our atunement with God's spirit is so needed. God, teach me costly sacrifice pleasing to you & help me to mean it.

home.

For Joe.
Economic incentives and ecological imperatives.
Today, for joy, through Christ, today.

63

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1Sm1-2 God is with us in our barrenness. It is enough. By that and through that it is the making-meaningful of every circumstance that is worthy of songs, hymns and magnificats. And yet there are those who miss it, who, even being so close to things so miraculous, who choose quicker gratifications. Would that all sons might know that God is not like their father Eli, not quick to judge drunk, not anxious about his reputation. So in the knowledge of the God who comes running, let us love this Friday.

1Sm3 Started some wonderings about difficult words & all prophecy being for edification & that, but these thoughts seem dry & useless. I make all my narratives objectifications, & so also the narratives about my narratives. Speak Lord. Instruct me, make me teachable, learning from Eli so that I might learn to say with a whole heart that your servant is listening. Speak & disrupt my stories, categories, expectations. Need you. Speak so that I'm more than this clattering monologue, speak that I'd speak, speak that things happen. Tell us what's on your heart. We would sleep in your sanctuary so that we might hear & recognise your voice, speak, Lord, because you speak.

1Sm4 A chapter full of griefs, losses & humiliations. If the covenant box is the site of divine disclosure, & we know this to be our hearts bodies minds, can this be stolen? What comes to steal divine presence, divine conversation?

1Sm5-6 Divining signs and distinguishing coincidences out of the signal to noise ratio of God's will.. The gods aren't angry but. So many ways God shares a shelf with Dagons in my life, so many ways the kibod of God is not given its due weight in my life. This is life out of balance whence comes our tumours. So repentance, that our prayers may not be hindered.

1Sm7-8 Samuel led well, settling disputes, serving as a judge, building altars to the one God, interceding for a faithless people without overlooking their idols. & then we have bad reasons for seeking a leader, motivations of status, custom, false security. Let us seek God that we would not wound him, for God knows all our rejections of him, the all-powerful has made himself vulnerable before our choice.

1Sm9-10 What is handsome? The bible here has no qualms at adopting this problematic disney criteria of comparative description and discrimination. Used here in a cautionary context perhaps but why? It still stands to legitimate aesthetic partiality. Perhaps the translation could come softer 'considered handsome'? .. The culturally beautiful and less blemished are popularly esteemed as moral role models: how should we then look? How should we then look on those? Of kingship, there is a contradiction at play here that I have not squared, that Samuel would speak so strongly against this institution, and its vanity, and then verses later the text condemns Saul for hiding from it, and worthless fellows for doubting it. Anyways. Know we now that same speaking, rushing-upon spirit of God is ours today and more so, go we into today to speak expectant elaborate specific future tenses.

1Sm11-12 More questions. Genuine questions, but maybe we can tentatively hypothesise a little. Correct me. There is no one correct model of leadership? There are seasons for types of leadership? It was sinful to seek a king in this context because it was a rejection of God, a failure of trust. We are apt to make idols of our leaders? We use leaders to try to mediate with a God who whishes to be immediate and unmediated. Holding kingship & Christ together, our analogies become idolatries if we hold them too tightly or hold them wrongly. Buber talks of idolatry not being a simple substitute of something else for God in the place of our worship, but also in the way we relate to the onjet of our worship, we need to repsect the disanalogies between the way we are to relate to God and all & and human relationship in order both that these latter relationships can healthily image the divine, & that our relation to God our source, centre, sovereign, saviour does not become damaged in its being diluted or distorted by all that is incomparable in human relationships. Positively, leaders are defenders of those they are responsible for. Hmm. Go is always pleased to make us his. Breathe that in.

1Sm13-14 Funny that here at home also we wrestle in the meeting of tardiness and the well-intentioned impatience of an aging, risk-averse king? Setting arbitrary oaths is a symptom of losing fresh faith. Contrasted with Jonathan's but-if-not.. So, come, let us risk for it may be that God.. Come, nothing can hinder God from saving.

1Sm15-16 'I did obey the Lord' – not the first time Saul has convinced himself of his own godliness. how do we deceive ourselves, how do we rationalise our disobedient choices? This the desire to be our own god, the arrogance as sinful as idolatry. The end of Saul's strange reign & David's anointing a painful mess, church politics nothing new under the sun.. what might we learn about unity? The story would be different if Saul's desperate power-grasping had instead been humility. Today seeking the God who already knows, the God who looks at the heart.

1Sm17 What has not already been said of this story but that it is true and particular for you on July's 23rd. Something a little Just William in David's dialogue made me to smile on my way. And oh that we would come at modernity 'with sticks' so to the woods. Spiritual jiujitsu is a true truth and we should aspire to those pebbles, to be even extremely small but incredibly well aimed, so in our gathering and all our concepts of scale. Small is beautiful and urgent. Struck by Eliab and his cruel why in this reading: discouraged discouragers, I have know this slippery slope. God stay me.

1Sm18-19 I feel for Saul. It is painful to feel that someone else has been chosen & you have not, that God is with them in a way that God is not with you. A new testiment lens changes our theology, but we can identify the feeling of abandonment. How do we then live? Perhaps we could take from this passage that abandonment to God is the way to quell competitive comparing.

1Sm20-21 These friendships are the bromances we can, in our Life less proud, be so opened to, a yet foreign intensity of filial affection, what must we do to find such, what common cause creates such comradeship? These adventures are true myths, like the one we would be swept up in: church as an mmpg enfleshed: on a mission, for a cause, against opposing enemies run we with coded encouragement and strange assistance. I will ask for the bread we need from the God who is still good, I will be a fool, seem a fool and be despised, on that path of trust, in the cause of love, in the eyes of all, in the face of doubt, now in the arms of one, let us be as Jonathan to the other and more on mission.

1Sm22-23 Fragments. Bits of David's character come through that don't quite make for a tidy meditation, so is real life, what a strange rush of fragments of thoughts sleep dreams prayers. There was something about David – what makes someone such that when trying to hide he is sought out by the needy to lead? David who notices the one, who shoulders responsibility, an adventurer carer? David of straightforward conversation with God. Hello God, you are God, we acknowledge you, we surrender. Our 'shall I..?' 'will this..?' We beg you to answer. Lead us.

1Sm24-25 Mercy justice mercy justice. The best I can do for 24 is perhaps to ask what it would be to cut the corner off capitalism's cloak? 25, Abigail here with her mercy sheeps, a woman with a plan, a lady with a lamp, a long sufferer, a visionary peacemaker, an adventuring carer, here risking in midnight mediation. Thus should we be. The non-violent world we all want cannot be come to by mere passive resistance, but by active insistence on another's behalf, may we be gifting go-betweeners, mercy mediators, defending even the rightly maligned, speaking at cost for the foolishly blind, because love wins, because God will judge, because God is still good.

1Sm26-27 Keep on keeping on, for days will follow days follow this one. When the same enemy attacks again, bring it to God with honest frustration his 54th Psalm, this is what intimacy with God looks like & remembering that God is good & to be trusted, again againembody love from the difficult place, mercy has not limit. How to square with David's subsequent decamp to the Phillistines, unsure. A running away? Or somehow the overflow of this trust? Discernment we ask for.

1Sm28-29 Consulting the dead, oh what a world is this we live in. In that state of divine disconnect, when we choose against God, we are at the mercy of any advice, strung out, strung along, filled by any fattened calf.. Then they rose and went away that night, badland drifters, as you say, abandoned by for not being abandoned to. Now David cannot, and neither we, be allied to any other. Try as we may, in trying to ease our exile, we are marked by an alterior, somewhat as AIIIH's Daniel last night, doubted by deputies, for better and worse. We can pretend a peace in peacetime but we will have to pick a side and we have already been picked.

1Sm30-31 Rescue Missions: These are God's work in us & our work in God. Restoration from captivity & then some to give away. Is David's distribution premised on Matt20's grace or Rom12's gifts? ..And when does it matter? Saul & the importance of funerals, to you in the west country as you celebrate the importance of weddings.