Those who hate me without reason outnumber the hairs of my head; many are my enemies without cause, those who seek to destroy me. I am forced to restore what I did not steal. – Psalm 69:4

Today’s Scripture Reading (January 22, 2013): Psalm 69

Often our cries to God imply that we are innocent. It is the “Woe is me, have I not ...” kind of response we have when we are in trouble. As I talk to people, I have to admit that often my reaction to their cries is sometimes not filled with empathy. When they ask why this is happening, it is sometimes too easy as an outsider to sit in judgment and wonder how it is that they do not know. Do they not see the cause, in their own lives, of their struggle? But maybe we as a people are not self aware enough to understand the cause for what it is that we are struggling through. It is easy to see it in the lives of someone else, but not quite as easy to see it if it is in our own lives.

David cries out to God. In this case his enemies may be many, but the leader of his enemies is very intimately known by David. His enemy is his son – Absalom. And the reasons for David’s struggle is clearly present in his relationship with his own family. In the experience that David had with Bathsheba, the very fabric of David’s family was torn. It was a cause that had snowballed. David’s Son Amnon raped his sister, Tamar. Absalom, filled with hate because of the rape, killed his brother Amnon. David had felt that the only reaction that he could have was to send Absalom, his son, into exile. And although he did allow Absalom to return to Jerusalem, for two years David still refused contact with his son. So the snowball kept on getting bigger until finally Absalom decided to rebel against his dad – to gather the enemies of dad together and begin the process of trying to take the throne. But the seed of all of the pain that David was feeling now existed in the sins of his own past.

And so as David cries out to God his lack of understanding, he himself seems to be blind to the seeds of his own actions in the rebellion that he now has to quell. And he seems to forget the prophecy of Nathan that it is because of his own sin the sword would not depart from his family.

In the Protestant Church we do not like the idea of confession, but one of the elements of true confession is that we allow someone else have eyes on our life – and in that process we get a chance to see the things that we are blind to – the areas of our lives and the sins where we are not self aware. It is something that we all need, because on some level we all lack a level of self awareness.   

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: 2 Samuel 16