David The GreatIsampula

David's Childhood

If David had written an autobiography, I believe he would have emphasized that being the choice of God isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Any person seeking to live for God faces excruciatingly tough decisions. Living out that passion for God in such a violent era as David’s is what makes his story so raw and so maddeningly complex.

It could be said that because of Saul’s failures, God stripped David of his childhood. At the age an average teenager today learns to drive, David cut off the head of a giant. During the years today’s young adults attend college, start their careers, and plan their futures, David was an outlaw hiding in caves.

His life makes us rethink the whole question of what it means to be set apart by God for great things. Between David’s anointing and his public coronation, decades of waiting, and bloodshed, and waiting, and running, and waiting, and deceiving, and waiting pass by. Years of waiting. Being a man after God’s own heart means living life open and submitted to God’s will and timing. It means telling Him, “I’m Yours, and I will trust in You, no matter what.” In David’s case, “no matter what” meant no matter how many spears his father-in-law threw at him.