Monday, June 22 – Sunday, June 28

“Be gentle with the young man Absalom, for my sake.” David gives this order to commanders preparing for war against the very son who drove him from his throne. It is one of the most startling sentences in the Old Testament — a father, fighting a battle he did not choose, still pleading for the safety of the one who chose it.

And when the news comes — not of victory, but of Absalom’s death — David does not celebrate. He climbs to the room above the gate and weeps until his grief becomes a kind of liturgy: O my son, my son. A father can be against his child’s choices and still entirely for his child. These are not contradictions. They are the shape of real love.

This is also, faintly, the shape of the gospel. Paul tells us that when the time had fully come, God sent His Son to redeem those under the law — not because we had earned sonship, but because the Father wanted sons. We were once far off, even hostile, and still He moved toward us, not against us, at infinite cost to Himself. “If only I had died instead of you” was, in fact, fulfilled — not by David, but by Christ.

Whatever your child has chosen, whatever distance now sits between you, let David’s grief be a mirror for your own heart, and let the gospel be a window into a Father whose love reaches further than ours ever could.