Overcoming Ziklag Moments

Would you please turn with me to First Samuel 30. I can still remember this like it was yesterday. It was Saturday morning, May 10, 1986. I was still in bed when I got a call from my uncle, Anthony, and he said two words, after which I didn't hear anything else. He said, “Dot’s gone.”

Dot, Dorothy, was my mom. She had passed away the night before, and Anthony had the responsibility of letting the children know because my dad was just so torn up about it that he could not make the phone call. I cannot tell you how devastating that was for me. Not only was the fact that my mom was just 48 years old, but what hurts so much was the fact that she lived less than an hour away, and I always said I needed to go home and see her.

The last time I saw her was shortly after our youngest son was born, and I probably saw her maybe once or twice after that. Always promising to go home and see her and never making it. I must admit that there are times when I beat myself up about it, and next year will be 40 years since her passing.

I remember when the funeral director took care of her body and put her in the casket, because she had not been sick, she looked like herself, almost as if she was sleeping. From the time they put her in the casket until the time of the funeral, I probably went to the funeral home two or three times every single day.

I thought about that as it relates to the record we're going to read tonight. Because it's a record that talks about something unexpected and challenging, and sometimes the unexpected things are hard on you, there are opportunities to reflect on other aspects of your life that perhaps should be in your life.

I remember when we moved here and I took a job at Wright State. The president who hired me died three years later of pancreatic cancer. Three weeks later, the new president had one of his vice presidents let me know that my services were no longer needed. I went home and told Doris what happened. I love my wife. While I'm devastated and trying to wrap my mind around it, she's hot! She’s angry. The new president wanted to replace me with his person, and I happened to be over communications and marketing at the time. It wasn’t a performance issue. I had never been fired from a job.

One more. I thought the death of my mom was hard, but the death of Candace was harder. The day she died her mom and I, and Steven just had your normal, typical day. My heart goes out to Stephen because he was the one who found his sister in her bed after she had passed. My first thought was, “Father, I want her back. I want her back.” So, I went into her room and started praying and calling, and I heard this really plainly, “She's with Me. She's not coming back.”

I can’t tell you the joy that I experienced in hearing that. Joy has nothing to do with your emotions. Joy has more to do with what you know and who you trust, and I had dropped Candace off at the altar many years before because I could see her life spiraling in the wrong direction. So, I said, “Father, what you need to do to make sure she gets to you, do it.”

When you have a lot of emotions happening at the same time and you hear things, then you go back did I really hear God say that 'Candace is with Me.” I knew I had heard that, but my emotions were so out of whack. I thank God for my pastor because the first thing he said when he walked in the door was that he had been praying and he had asked God \was she coming back and Jesus said no, she's staying with Me. That was the first thing he told me when he walked through the door.

The Bible gives us road maps when it comes to dealing with difficult situations like that. And tonight, we're going to look at one example of that, and I wish I had been at a place much earlier to understand the value of what we're going to read tonight.

So, let's begin in First Samuel 30, and what we're going to see is that chapter 30 is sandwiched between King Saul visiting the woman of Endor, who had a familiar spirit. Then we have David, and on the other side of David is where Saul dies in battle. I mention this because David was not part of Israel at this time.