BEING HUMAN

#BeingHuman. When trauma meets trauma in a divine consultation, or how broken people learn to help other broken people approach the unbroken God.

One. The wounded priest who lost everything. Abiathar carried wounds that never fully healed. “Now one of the sons of Ahimelech the son of Ahitub, named Abiathar, escaped and fled after David” (1 Samuel 22:20, NKJV). He alone survived the massacre at Nob, where Saul had eighty-five priests murdered for the crime of helping David, and the sacred bread that saved the lives of David and his men became the justification for killing all of them.

He must have asked many times why he survived, and why not his father Ahimelech, who showed courage in helping God’s anointed. The ephod he carried was more than a liturgical garment to him, since it represented the continuity of worshiping the same Lord his father had worshiped, inside the discontinuity of everything else. I imagine that every consultation with the Urim and Thummim brought back the voices of those who had been slaughtered.

His priesthood was forged in trauma rather than in temple service. He knew that serving God offers no immunity from suffering or from witnessing it, and that righteousness provokes persecution rather than preventing it. Yet he went on ministering, perhaps because meaning emerged from finding God’s purpose inside the pain rather than from avoiding it. For me Abiathar embodies the wounded healer, someone whose capacity to serve flows directly out of his familiarity with evil and loss.

Two. The wounded king who faced abandonment. “Now David was greatly distressed, for the people spoke of stoning him, because the soul of all the people was grieved, every man for his sons and his daughters” (1 Samuel 30:6, NKJV). At Ziklag, David met the ultimate leadership crisis, collective loss compounded by collective rejection, and I wrote about some of the leadership lessons of Ziklag a couple of weeks ago. The same men who had followed him through years of exile now gathered stones, because their grief had turned into rage.

David faced abandonment on every side. His wives captured, his city burned, his people hostile, and every human support system collapsing at once on the return to Ziklag. The text shows the crushing weight of leadership when protection fails and hope dies collectively, and I think here of the sixty-nine per cent of Ukrainians who do not believe anything good about peace will come from negotiations between the White House and the Kremlin. David, and I do not mean Zelensky at all, stands alone, bearing responsibility for losses beyond his control and facing possible execution at the hands of the people he had tried hardest to save.

The moment strips away every illusion of heroic leadership. David cannot inspire his way out of this, cannot strategize past collective despair, cannot fall back on charisma in the face of anguish this raw. He has to choose between self-preservation and seeking divine guidance whatever it costs, between fleeing further and standing firm in faith and in God’s mission. Authentic leadership sometimes means facing the stones of the people you love most.

Three. The wounded healing the wounded. “But David strengthened himself in the Lord his God. Then David said to Abiathar the priest, Ahimelech’s son, ‘Please bring the ephod here to me’” (1 Samuel 30:6–7, NKJV). Two deeply traumatized men now seek God together: the priest who lost his family and his fellow priests, and the king who lost his family, his city and his people’s trust.

Neither offers the other comfort, though something of it is there in the silence between them. Instead they create space for a divine consultation, and their interaction looks nothing like ordinary counseling or trauma healing, with all respect to the faith-based psychological and pastoral care we practice during this war. Abiathar does not attempt to heal David’s pain or offer psychological insight toward a coping strategy. David does not try to restore Abiathar’s shattered mind after the slaughter of his father and his family and his colleagues. What both men recognize is their need to consult God, and the ephod reminds them of their own limitation and of the possibility of divine intervention at the same time.

“Then David inquired of the Lord, saying, ‘Shall I pursue this troop? Shall I overtake them?’ And He answered him, ‘Pursue, for you shall surely overtake them and without fail recover all’” (1 Samuel 30:8, NKJV). God’s answer is concrete, doable and full of hope. The wounded priest facilitates the wounded king’s consultation, and their cooperation shows me that healing for our war-wounded people, theological leaders and church ministers in Ukraine can also emerge through a shared seeking of God’s will rather than through individual or group therapy alone.

Four. So what? For 1275 days of this full-scale unprovoked war we have been ministering inside a Ziklag reality, where our churches and seminaries, and not only our society, face loss and displacement and collective trauma while struggling to hold on to faith and to answer the question of where the Almighty is in all of it.

The David and Abiathar model offers me something for faith-based care in such contexts. Both pastor and parishioner may be wounded and healing at the same time, with neither of them holding complete answers, and both seeking a divine consultation together. I increasingly see that pastoral and psychological care in a war zone cannot rely on psychological technique alone, though technique remains a must, since it also has to create space for consulting God. Like Abiathar bringing the ephod, our theological leaders and church ministers can facilitate access to divine wisdom instead of offering merely human solutions to inhuman problems. I keep reminding myself that my focus belongs on looking for meaning inside the suffering rather than only on eliminating my own pain, and on seeking that consultation through the darkness rather than only on providing comfort.

“Cast your burden on the Lord, and He shall sustain you” (Psalm 55:22, NKJV). As broken people we learn to help other broken people approach the unbroken God. The ephod, as a symbol of God’s wisdom, still speaks to anyone courageous enough to ask the questions that unbroken evangelicals find most inconvenient, and to ask them in the dark, trusting that wounded healers can still make an encounter with the Almighty possible, as they did thousands of years ago.

We wish you peaceful skies and a silent night, and keep your children away from war. Taras D., Ukraine