Uriah said to David, “The ark and Israel and Judah are staying in tents, and my commander Joab and my lord’s men are camped in the open country. How could I go to my house to eat and drink and make love to my wife? As surely as you live, I will not do such a thing!” – 2 Samuel 11:11

Today’s Scripture Reading (March 24, 2016): 2 Samuel 11

Abraham Lincoln once commented that “character is like a tree and reputation like a shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.” Just as the tree creates the shadow, our character produces our reputation. But character is also a hard taskmaster. True character defines every moment of our lives and almost always prescribes actions that are inconvenient. But it is the sum of all of these inconvenient actions that really results in what we would describe as people of character.

The story of Uriah and David actually highlights a character difference, but the unexpected result is that it is not the king that gives evidence of character, it is Uriah. David should have been at the battle (it was the season when kings went to war) but instead, he stayed home at the palace and ended up sleeping with Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah and a woman that David had no business sleeping with. On the other hand, David calls Uriah home and entices him to go and sleep with his wife, but Uriah’s character refuses to allow for that. He is home to take care of a military task, and he refuses to allow himself to sleep in a house, and with his wife, while his colleagues are sleeping in a field at the front. The story highlights the established character of Uriah, and in this instance, the lack of character King David. Maybe it also highlights that those in leadership should never be allowed to lead us in character because sometimes they are lacking.

Maybe all of this is confirmation of Shakespeare’s advice placed on the lips of Polonius in Hamlet.

This above all: to thine own self-be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.

Of course, that means at some point that we will have decided who it is that we are. Then, when the stress level is raised and there seems to be nothing else we can do, it is our true self that will emerge – the self that has been there all along. On this day, this is the truth that Uriah teaches David. That there were some lines that can not be crossed. And that he knew himself and had established his personal character, he had set up the boundaries that he would not cross, and he had determined that he would be true to who he was, and, therefore, he could not be false to any other man.

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: 2 Samuel 12