“Chaos” is the word i’d use to describe the last week or so. I don’t remember a project that had so many technical problems. No sooner did we arrange a new credit card provider, than the damned server got so bad we actually had to move to a new one. Cue technical problem after technical problem, and now we’ve had to re-start from scratch as the MR.com domain is locked for a week when the press release is due on Tuesday. Nightmare, to say the least. One fire gets stamped out, and 5 more light up. It’s like Whack-A-Mole. I can’t wait for the press to rip into me.

Don’t get wrong, i wouldn’t change it for the world, but i could have chosen easier paths. Accountancy would have been safer. Boring, but far safer. A life in the home counties in a 9to5 City job, complete with Volvo Estate, dog gate, drug-dealing children and a resentful wife would have probably been smoother.

Now i think about it, that nausea is creeping up again. As they say, i think i just threw up in mouth a little bit.
But i’m pleased to report that the MR team are at their tree-swinging best, on top form. Morale is very high and we’re getting bullish. Every day i see these same people grow personally and professionally. Today they were critiquing each other’s CV’s, complete with the usual vicious ridicule and childlike vulnerability. It’s such a joy. Tommy is going to be teaching us all cage-fighting on set. We’re hiring a house to live in as the office HQ. This is the way things should be – business as a community effort to build prosperity. My delight and quasi-obsession with Persia is also reaching new heights, in tandem with her madness.

It’s frustrating when people talk about scripture like it’s some kind of fictional fantasy, although I understand why they say it. The vast majority of the time it’s simply that you have to *learn* how to read it, as it’s not just like a book or a newspaper. You can just pick up any religious writing and pick out verses as you please, or use it to justify anything you want. The aim is not entertainment, it is wisdom. Scripture is something that has to be *studied*, thought about, examined, debated and reflected upon. The way you read something can be paramount. You wouldn’t read gutter tabloids at a poetry evening and you wouldn’t look at porn the same way you traverse and quote scientific journals.

There are 2 ways to look at scripture – historically, and spiritually. The first is simply of a book with stories, and testimony of people that has been recorded as history. Our modern forensic history with devices recording it permanently is comparatively new, but before that we wrote what we saw and experienced down, were at pains to memorise every detail at length so it could preserved. Books like the Talmud, Bible and Qu’ran aren’t to be challenged as history, they *are* history – they are primary sources of recorded knowledge that our ascendants experienced, despite their limited technological understanding. Part of that knowledge and experience is emotional and spiritual truth.

But the real substance that makes up the “specialness” of scripture is when it is read spiritually. To read scripture properly takes time, discernment, wisdom, practice, attention, and mostly, help. You have to study it and think about it. You need it explained to you, and to work through it with other people. It’s about debating it, understanding it, reflecting on it, using your imagination to put yourself in the situations, and growing as a person by becoming wise from it. Understanding scripture takes a Jedi mind, and it’s not like picking up a celebrity magazine in a supermarket. It’s not for the faint-hearted, easily amused, simply-placated or those who like being comfortable and never challenged in their thinking and/or way of life. You need an active critical mind, intelligence and a burning passion to seek truth. If you want tat, stick to The Sun and put on some celeb gossip.

The thing I find so genuine about Christianity is that the Bible puts it all out there – flaws and everything. No human weakness is concealed; the bare truth is put on the table in all its nakedness no matter how bad it is. Personal mistakes, wrongdoing, sinfulness, difficulty, shame and everything you would want to cover up is just written down as is. You often find in other religions that the details are glossed over and heroic figures are PR-friendly because they are worshipped as saintly and perfect. Islam is extremely defensive over its prophets and Judaism will find a get-out clause to excuse wrongdoing. The PR is always in full effect. The Bible is plain about rights and wrongs, as well as achievements and faults.

It could have been covered up, but all the dirt was published right for everyone to see. It could have been the Disney sanitised version with a lovely PR spin, but it wasn’t. It could have been the nice stories, but most of them involve the dark side of human nature as much as they do the inspirational bits.

You can know man-made gods fairly easily in that they are permissive – they are created to allow us to do what we want and offer no real challenge to who we are. Authorities will create them to make others do their will (social order, religious dress code observance etc), and we will make them fit our own desires and prejudices. All of them are serving man somehow. The difference of real spirituality is that of a God who is separate, distinct, independent and sovereign – one who rules all, not just a selection with their unruly desires. The Abrahamic God certainly isn’t permissive.

I ask religious friends why the Old Testament (the Jewish Talmud) is so important as it just doesn’t seem relevant with all the Mosaic law and tales of destruction, and their answer is that all the situations we find ourselves in have happened before and the importance of context and prophecy fulfillment. The OT describes how the Father dealt with it then and the study of His relationship to the people of Israel as understanding of His character. What He says to them is what He says to all people individually and never changes because He is unchangeable and constant. Some of the characters in the OT defy classification and beggar belief.

Amongst them: Abraham (father of the Middle Eastern people), Moses (leader/saviour of Israel), Joshua (military invasion commander), Saul (murderous tyrant), David (King of Israel, founder of Jerusalem), Solomon (wise but fallen king) and more. Each had a separate and specific role and character that makes up a little part of each of us today. How they reacted and who they were is how we are tempted to behave or often feel like. The roads they walked down in extremes are often choices we face every day of our lives. Murder, treachery, adultery, war, violence, jealousy, greed, vanity, revenge, heroism, tragedy – all of these are standard stuff.

I love the Jewish people and the children of Israel with a childlike love. I know all too well what their enemies say, and what they have been guilty of, especially to Palestine. But you have to respect their incredible passion, resilience, ingenuity and political brilliance. No other people has endured what they have, has the history they do, or has changed the course of world events as they have. They’ve retain their individual culture despite all the attempts to destroy their identity and fight more fiercesomely than any other. I just feel a real resonance with the people, the land and their soul. I can’t explain why, i just do. I’ve always had Jewish friends and a total fascination/love of Israel.

I have a few favourites, but recently I’ve been studying David despite having ignored him before because of all the fantastic press. The father and greatest king of Israel, the Psalmist (a Psalm is a poem, basically), ancestor of Christ, almighty warrior and one of the most famous people in the history. There is so much to say about this man – the Jewish people hold him as their icon and believe the military Messiah is still to come from his lineage and he obviously famous for the incident with Goliath. An incredible warrior and military strategist, a powerful king and an incredible artist, musician and writer. Deeply loved by God and said to be of the same heart. David is revered, respected, wondered at, looked up to and held in legendary status for his incredible success and place in history. Having balls doesn’t go far enough for this guy, nether does following your heart.

But what i’ve found fascinating about David is that he is nothing of the sort when you look deeper into his character. The David we celebrate is very unlike the one found in the Bible.

Starting off, he’s fair-haired, which is unusual for the Middle East. He’s the youngest of all the sons, which traditionally meant he was the runt and disregarded, as the first born received all the inheritance. He is cast into the desert and irrelevant. But being a shepherd in Judah wasn’t quite what we perceive as being a shepherd to be nowadays with the cloak, staff and fluffy sheep; Judah was a wild land of insane animals and harsh landscape. Sheep and cattle were ravaged by lions, bears and vicious beasts, all in the middle of a desert. When the Bible talks about being a vulnerable lamb in the desert, it means business. If one of your flock went astray, it was most likely being ripped apart by lions, and your duty was to save that little guy from their jaws and keep the rest together. Rarely are there more frightening and rough conditions to be living under and fighting against.

Straight away you see something in that – in all of the leaders of scripture, all were built in the desert, the nothingness. That’s where the Father creates them, His chosen training ground. The ones who were chosen were the unusual, the unexpected, the forgotten. The alien stranger and least likely was the one picked from the others who expected it first. The greatest leaders were put into the greatest hardship to be trained before they were anointed. Before they were given their task and responsibility, they suffered. It was where David learnt to be an expert with the slingshot and developed his courage.

Time moves on after he is picked out, and the Philistines have surrounded the Israelites in massive numbers, just as the wild animals surrounded his flock in the desert with their baying jaws. For 6 weeks these vicious bastards lorded it up, scaring the crap out the Israelite army and taunting them about how they were going to kill them. That’s got to weaken morale.

David turns up, and he stands up to the thousands of his fellow soldiers, declaring victory. They laugh at him and put him down as he’s skinny and weak, and can’t even put on anyone’s armour. But he doesn’t just declare it to his countrymen, he goes out to meet the tallest, loudest, most vicious opponent they have and tells him to his face that he’s going to kill him that day in front of thousands of people. THAT is balls. He defies everyone, even his friends who are telling him to shut up. He doesn’t care, he just marches on out focused on beating him. It’s going to be easy to doubt yourself at that point when you’ve made a tit out of yourself and will never live it down if it goes wrong. His reaction is one of total contempt and disgust – “Who IS this uncircumcised Philistine?”. Total courage, defiance and balls. He declares victory before the battle has even begun whilst everyone else is scared silly.

But what’s interesting is what he declares. He says that despite being smaller, weaker, and only having a slingshot, the Father has decided the outcome of the fight already. Nothing to do with him, the armies, the weapons, the weather or anything else. Because of his extravagant display and vicious strike, the enemy crumbles and he returns to become commander. He’s not interested in anyone’s doubt, the size of the problem, the scary displays or the total lack of belief from the big tough guys standing beside him. It’s cold, calculated military precision and courageous leadership in the face of looking very stupid. Imagine how you’d be feeling if you saw some skinny runt going out to meet some 10ft bastard with just a bit of rope, declaring the victory in the face of everything seeming to be to the contrary. Then imagine how you’d feel once you saw him being right. Quite a life-changing day.

One hell of an inspirational leader who was banished to the desert in fear of the king because of how powerful he had become. Years went on, he became king and Israel went from strength to strength, with its peoples united, Jerusalem established and Judah a powerful nation under a great leader. Everything you read about him praises his heart, his cunning and how he was the greatest patriarch of the people, who loved him.

But despite all his heroic status, the inner state of David was incredibly different to what was projected on the outside. He was tortured, alone, impossibly emotional and driven by terrible darkness. Despite being a great courageous king, he was a broken man.

Many writers describe how they find it difficult to express the ineffable, ineffable sadness of the relationships of David. He loved his best friend with a love passing that of women, only for him to be killed savagely. He loved Jonathan’s sister Michal, and she loved him; only for her to come to despise his spirituality, and to cheat on him repetitively. And Saul’s sons, David’s brothers-in-law, the brothers of his deep deep best friend, joined their father the king in persecuting him in the wilderness years. David so loved his son Absalom, his very soul was consumed for him (grieving him beyond words when he was killed in a botched assassination attempt); but that son bitterly hated David, and coolly plotted to destroy him and his reputation. David loved Abigail and Ahinoam, but those fairy tale romances took a bitter blow when he fell for Bathsheba. He loved his parents, especially caring for their safe keeping in his wilderness years; only to be forsaken by them, and to be rejected by his brothers and sisters. He loved his son Solomon and gave very special attention to teach him the real spirit of the truth, taking time out from a hectic public life to do so; only for that beloved son to turn away in later life, to fast women, alcohol, materialism, and the perversions of idolatry.

A broken man betrayed at every corner, but the greatest leader the people had ever known. Not exactly what you’d expect with someone so great.

The famous failing of David was his genuinely horrendous campaign to use his power as king to steal away another man’s wife. Bathsheba was married to Uriah, but David got her pregnant, and covered it by deliberately sending Uriah into a battle situation where he arranged for him to be abandoned and killed. David then married the widow and took her for himself, officially making him not only an adulterer, but a murderer by proxy.

He was prone to fits of introspection; dramatic mood-swings, suffered massive clinical depression, sometimes appearing a real ’softie’ but hard as nails at others; easily getting carried away: be it with excessive emotional enthusiasm for bringing the ark back, in his harsh response to Hanun humbling his servants, his over-hasty and emotional decision to let Amnon go to Absalom’s feast when it was obvious what might well transpire, his anger ” flaring up” because of incompetency, or in his ridiculous softness for his treacherous son Absalom. He clearly had a very serious anger problem.

He had a heart cruelly torn so many ways and he hated with a violent hatred: ” I hate them, O Lord, that hate you…I hate them with perfect hatred…search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts.” But the trauma of his life, the betrayals, jealousies and hatred of others, led him to the kind of bitterness which so often surfaces in the Psalms and is reflected in several historical incidents where he lacks the value of others’ lives which we would otherwise expect from a man who is claimed to have walked so closely with his God.

Some of the other less holy things he got up to were even more extraordinary:

He was barred from building the temple because of the amount of blood he had shed;
When told to slay 100 Philistines, he slays 200 for good measure;
His wife Michal was a big fan of having pagan images at home, despite the 2nd commandment;
He was arrogantly “displeased” with God because He had slain a man who was trying to assist his personal project;
He systematically made sure every male in Edom was murdered;
He seemed to revel and glory in how he destroyed his enemies (2 Sam. 22:41-43)
He ignored God repetitively, carrying on with his own ideas and dreams;
But if that’s not enough, consider some of these incidents:

He deceived Achish by pretending he was attacking Jewish towns, when in fact he was going out and attacking the Amalekite settlements, killing all men, women and children in them so that nobody was left alive to tell that it was him who had attacked them. Innocent people were slain by David’s sword for the ‘political’ reason that he had to keep Achish ‘in the dark’ about what he was really up to. And so in case a 5 year old say something incriminating later, David simply killed the little boy.

Once King, he decides to get back his ex-wife Michal, who was by now married to Phaltiel, who evidently loved her. Yet he takes her from Phaltiel, and we have the tragic image of the loving husband walking behind her weeping as she is led away from him.

When he defeated Moab, he made the captives lay down in three lines. He arbitrarily chose one line to keep alive, and killed the other two lines. This can’t be justified as some careful obedience to some Mosaic law. It reads like something out of the Holocaust, an arbitrary slaying of some in order to exercise the whim of one’s own power.

There have been so many character studies and historical analyses done of David that it would be pointless to go through them all, and of course, being such a prominent figure in Jewish culture he is immensely celebrated and known for being such a great leader and king. In Samuel and the book of Acts, he is described by the Father as “a man after mine own heart”. Quite an honour, but very, very challenging. Scripture teaches that God looks at the heart and examines it, not the appearance. It’s for that reason you can’t just say sorry for being bad and get forgiveness dished out on a plate – the Father forgives only the truly repentant, and because He knows our heart, he knows when we’re truly and honestly repentant or just saying it.

Obviously being a human man, it is foolish to say that the Father is like David, with murderous intent, infidelity and propensity to emotional overload. More likely to say that the son was born with the Father’s heart, which is what this article is about. There’s no doubt that it was certainly corrupted and jaded (just read the Psalms for his despair), but it was righteous underneath all. What i like about David is that he was completely ruled by his heart beyond anything else, and always followed it no matter what. He followed his heart so blindly that he almost wasn’t in control of himself. There is an honesty and purity in that.

I found that impossibly hard to reconcile. How could the Father continue to bless and empower someone who behaved so incredibly callously and immorally, even evilly? How could he continue to be so successful, chosen and supported when he deliberately disobeyed, wilfully sinned and defiantly sought the desires of his own heart when he was blatantly picked out and blessed as he was?

Then it hit me.

It’s the love of a father.

That might seem simple to you. It’s not to me. I don’t understand it at all. I think i understand how to be a father myself, but i absolutely don’t get what it must have been like to live like that and still be blessed, and not damned. I don’t get how he could be loved and supported after doing all that, and carrying on to be like that. I know i’d love my son that way, but i just can’t empathise with the son at all. I have no idea whatsoever. It’s totally alien to me, a complete unknown. I can’t fathom it; it escapes me. Surely his blessing and the favour on his life would have been taken from him just like Saul’s was? They were both totally disobedient but the apparent difference with David was in his heart. As i’m writing this i’m still trying to figure it out. What was it about David’s heart and motivation that kept his blessing when both Saul and Solomon’s was taken away?

He was disciplined and limited in so many ways, as the Father held him to account and indeed punished him, but he was never stripped of his anointing. He was given victory after victory in spite of his defiance and behaviour, presumably because his heart was in the right place. They say he sought God everywhere he went and everything he did. He wasn’t given mercy or pity for the bad things that had happened to him, or rewarded for his selfish intent. He went down in history because of grace, not for his own talents or repentance. It’s a total mystery to me.

The heart has reason that knows only itself, and justifies only itself in the pursuit of its desires. We may have only our eyes in the desert we know, but away from all the earthly creatures we do have the heart – and it’s that we have to be in agreement with above all else. Is there anything else? If i’m honest, the older i get, the more of a mystery the heart and soul become. They follow no logic, have no apparent direction, and impossibly, are not only the scourge of our dark hours, but also the source of our greatest moments. We have spent thousands of years trying to understand them only to be lost in circles and realising it is them that have led us to trying to understand them in the first place. We search to understand ourselves, when we are only meant to be ourselves.

Some wish they could surgically tear theirs out, just to avoid the pain they generate. It’s amazing how we can deliberately build concrete around them yet for them to still be so vulnerable, as if the concrete was transparent and ineffective from the start. We have no defence against love apart from denial, as separation only acts to make the poison worse. What a beautiful and archetypal trap. We can’t run from what makes us ourselves and what was there by design, no matter how clever our technology. Even the greatest scientists can’t stop themselves running around foolishly trying to impress a pretty girl, no matter how bitter they are. No amount of pain can stop us wanting to try again somewhere deep inside. No desperation can cut us off from feeling hope.

And who can say they regret following their heart? What shame can be found in the foolishness of embracing it? After all is said and done, is the alternative something to be proud of and fulfilled by? Can a life of evasion, risk-avoidance and face-saving really be an achievement to look back on with a smile? Would you rather be compelled and wrapped in the chaos of your human heart than the quiet numb mediocrity of a blank hospital pain sheet? I would rather have 1000 regrets, destroyed report card and muddy trashed face than a death bed complimented by the same shiny untouched armour i came into this world with. Scars aren’t just a mark of honour, rather a work of art.

And after all, it can all be crudely summarised into one thing – an honesty. An honesty to live truly and passionately. I don’t know if my report card will reflect that, but i’m hopeful, just like my heart.

“The heart of David, the people of Moses, the path of Joshua, the problems of Saul, the insight of Solomon and the task of Nehemiah.”

Mary