Monday, August
20, 2018
Some time later two prostitutes came to the king to have an argument
settled. “Please, my lord,” one of them
began, “this woman and I live in the same house. I gave birth to a baby while she was with me
in the house. Three
days later this woman also had a baby. We
were alone; there were only two of us in the house. “But her baby died during the night when she
rolled over on it. Then she got up in
the night and took my son from beside me while I was asleep. She laid her dead child in my arms and took
mine to sleep beside her. And
in the morning when I tried to nurse my son, he was dead! But when I looked more closely in the morning
light, I saw that it wasn’t my son at all.”
Then the other woman interrupted, “It certainly was your son, and the
living child is mine.” “No,” the first
woman said, “the living child is mine, and the dead one is yours.” And so they argued back and forth before the
king. Then the king said, “Let’s get the
facts straight. Both of you claim the
living child is yours, and each says that the dead one belongs to the other. All right, bring me a
sword.” So a sword was brought to the
king. Then he said, “Cut the living
child in two, and give half to one woman and half to the other!” Then the woman who was the real mother of the
living child, and who loved him very much, cried out, “Oh no, my lord! Give her
the child—please do not kill him!” But
the other woman said, “All right, he will be neither yours nor mine; divide him
between us!” Then the king said, “Do not
kill the child, but give him to the woman who wants him to live, for she is his
mother!” When all Israel heard the
king’s decision, the people were in awe of the king, for they saw the wisdom
God had given him for rendering justice.
1 Kings 3:16-28(NLT)
Of course, it was never a
thought in the king’s mind to cut a living child in two. Solomon was counting on the most basic human
instinct a mother has (to protect her child) to get at the truth of whose baby
was before him. When the king saw the
real mother’s willingness to let the child live, even at the expense of letting
her son go, he knew he had the right mother.
Solomon was the judge
between these two women, but, greater than judge, he was also their
friend. By pushing the envelope with the
child’s life hanging in the balance the king forced both of them to open their
eyes to the truth.
To the real mother, this
friendship was a matter of acknowledging and affirming in her the genuine gift
of motherhood, her willingness to put aside personal feelings and do that which
is best for her child.
To the other one who had
lost her own child in infancy, Solomon forced to surface the truth that her selfishness
in stealing another’s child wasn’t the answer to the grief she was
battling. That grief may have been what
caused this coldness towards the living child and the other mother. She was attempting to deal with the grief of
her loss by inflicting her pain on another.
It is what we do when the pain is too great!
I have had friends like Solomon. I have been in circumstances that produced grief
in me big enough to overwhelm my ability to make a sound choice of what to do
next. You get stuck, unable to move
forward, and, like a car’s wheel, bogged-down in a snow drift, your judgment is
in danger of freezing to death. Then a
friend utters the simple, basic truth you’ve been unwilling to face, because it
demands humility in the face of your pride, or surrender when you’d rather
control, or change when you’re so unmotivated in your current tiredness…and you
realize the familiar mess you’re in is more dangerous than the move forward
into the unfamiliar unknown of the future.
And you press on!
That’s what a friend is really
like!
For You Today
If you have, or have had, one or
two friends in your life willing to bring truth to the surface for you, you are
indeed blessed.
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