Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

After the death of Saul, David returned from striking down the Amalekites and stayed in Ziklag two days. On the third day a man arrived from Saul’s camp with his clothes torn and dust on his head. When he came to David, he fell to the ground to pay him honor.
“Where have you come from?” David asked him.
He answered, “I have escaped from the Israelite camp.”
“What happened?” David asked. “Tell me.”
“The men fled from the battle,” he replied. “Many of them fell and died. And Saul and his son Jonathan are dead.”
Then David said to the young man who brought him the report, “How do you know that Saul and his son Jonathan are dead?”
“I happened to be on Mount Gilboa,” the young man said, “and there was Saul, leaning on his spear, with the chariots and their drivers in hot pursuit. When he turned around and saw me, he called out to me, and I said, ‘What can I do?’
“He asked me, ‘Who are you?’
“‘An Amalekite,’ I answered.
“Then he said to me, ‘Stand here by me and kill me! I’m in the throes of death, but I’m still alive.’
“So I stood beside him and killed him, because I knew that after he had fallen he could not survive. And I took the crown that was on his head and the band on his arm and have brought them here to my lord.”
Then David and all the men with him took hold of their clothes and tore them. They mourned and wept and fasted till evening for Saul and his son Jonathan, and for the army of the Lord and for the nation of Israel, because they had fallen by the sword.
David said to the young man who brought him the report, “Where are you from?”
“I am the son of a foreigner, an Amalekite,” he answered.
David asked him, “Why weren’t you afraid to lift your hand to destroy the Lord’s anointed?”
Then David called one of his men and said, “Go, strike him down!” So he struck him down, and he died. For David had said to him, “Your blood be on your own head. Your own mouth testified against you when you said, ‘I killed the Lord’s anointed.’”

• 2 Samuel 1:1-16

I write this with a heavy heart.

Just before I was laid off, the lay off that was really an early retirement, I was called to a job site in Alcoa, TN.  Two people had been injured and the parent company of the company I worked for was responsible for everything on the project.  I was called in for being the safety director of our company and having experience in the metals industry, although that did not matter much at all.  The two injured parties had something between a first aid injury and a medical treatment case, but in both cases, they went to the ER after work.

I was selected to stay at the site to “straighten out the mess.”  But the only problem that really needed to be corrected was on the customer side of the house, to inform the nurses on shift that the contractors had an agreement to use their services.  And I had to communicate the rules to everyone.  That would have avoided all the problems, but since I was there, I was asked to stay.  But I had a fulltime job back in Pennsylvania, which may have led to them deciding that they could do without me.  In my exit interview with the company president, I was told that I had saved a multi-million-dollar project, and I gave the customer the confidence to give us the second line when it was needed, but it never was.  But doing all that was “nice”, and I had to be shown the door.  “Oh, but you are needed back in Tennessee next week, and we are putting you on contract at about 75% what you were paid.”  I took the contract because I had a friend that needed me there.

But I could not be everywhere on such a huge project and the company took over the contract of a contract safety person on site.  While most people come and go, and you hardly remember them a year later, it has now been ten years since that chance meeting, and I still consider him a friend.

But his wife passed away about six months ago.  And if I had not gone on Facebook, I would not have seen an odd post comment that made me dig further. I do not blame my friend. I went through some awkward conversations, not knowing how to let people know. Not everyone uses the same platform, and my friend in Tennessee used Facebook, and I rarely looked in that direction. Telling him about my wife’s passing was awkward.

This is supposed to be the information age, the communication age.

I heard pastors talking recently and they said the family unit these days is falling apart, mostly because they do not see each other eye to eye.  They have their faces buried in a cellphone screen.

I joined Facebook when my high school class was planning a 40^th reunion.  We are nearly to 55 years now, and I will never know about the reunion, since Facebook was so jammed with garbage sent by people I did not know, I quit going there.  A prompt about a post from my son urged me to go, maybe by God’s urging, or I would have never known about my friend’s wife, who my wife had loved like a sister.

As my friend said, he and I share in yet another similarity, both of us having lost our wives in the same calendar year.

The late notice hurts, but not as much as my grief for my friend and his family.

But why is it that with all these communication advances, we simply do not communicate anymore?

Since we have children or grandchildren who have not developed the skills of maintaining a conversation, what would happen if all the screens turned themselves off?  Would we stare at each other, not knowing what to say?

The Scripture talks about a few days between Saul and Jonathan dying and the Amalekite taking credit for having killed them, losing his life in the process.  But somehow, that seems space-aged communication compared to what we have now.

And maybe that is what the governments of this world want, for us to be staring at screens while they destroy this planet that God had created.

I must stop writing for now.  I will be back tomorrow, but I need to grieve, yet again.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.