Previous Challenge Entry (Level 4 – Masters)
Topic: ARROW (11/17/22)
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TITLE: The Risks of Friendship | Previous Challenge Entry
By Laurie Kiel
11/24/22 -
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The heart splitting grief of losing a friend. Many of you know what I mean, either through experience or witnessing someone else’s heartache.
Perhaps you have a friend that is closer than a brother, or sister. And then they’re gone, through deception, desertion, death. There's forever a hole in your heart. I witnessed firsthand such a grief in my husband David.
What was that horrendous guttural wail echoing through our encampment? Was it a wounded animal? It was so gut wrenching, so heart rending. Were we under attack, should we hide ourselves?
And then I saw David and realized, those awful sounds were coming from the breaking heart of my husband. And I heard a loud crack of breaking wood, and saw David toss two halves of a broken arrow into the forest.
I remembered when David was holding that same arrow in his hands and said to me, “Abigail, an arrow like this saved my life.”
I was all ears, ready to hear a rousing tale of how a valiant archer shot an attacker about to kill David. But no, he proceeded to tell me a tale of a friendship, and how his friend Jonathan had used an arrow to warn David to flee for his life—to flee from Jonathan’s own father, Saul.
David told me how his friend refused to believe that his own father wanted David dead but was willing to test the situation. He would have David stay away from the royal table. And later, based on Saul’s reaction to David’s absence, Jonathan would go out into the woods to shoot arrows.
Jonathan would shoot three arrows by the stone Ezel where David would be hiding. After shooting three arrows he would send a boy and say “go find the arrows” and if Jonathan then said “Look, the arrows are to this side of you, bring them here, then come, because as surely as the Lord lives, you are safe; there is no danger.
“But if I say to the boy, ’Look the arrows are beyond you,’ then you must go, because the Lord has sent you away.” (1 Sam 20:21-22). David told me how he waited in hiding to hear the words that would come after Jonathan said, “Go find the arrows”.
Even though he knew what words would be coming next, it was still like an arrow through his heart to hear “the arrows are beyond you.”
For he knew his friendship with Jonathan was over, then he immediately corrected himself. It wasn’t over, It would never be over, but after one last hug in the woods, he would never see Jonathan face to face again. But even though Saul’s rabid jealousy kept these friends apart, they were not really separated, for David carried Jonathan in his heart.
David kept an arrow next to his belongings in camp to remind him how just as the true flight of an arrow defends us from an attack, the true path of our friendships protects us from the perils of loneliness.
But not that terrible day. I picked up the broken pieces of the arrow that David had flung into the darkness, and looked at them as if I was looking at the broken pieces of David’s heart.
Though the friendship of Jonathan caused my husband such pain, it had brought him such joy. Jonathan’s friendship made David a better leader, a better husband, a better man. Great friendships bring the risk of great pain. It was worth the risk for David. And it’s worth the risk for you.
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