I Shall Go to Him Is What David Said When Nothing Came Back

The hardest conversations I have are not with people who are ashamed. They are with people who have lost somebody who is still alive.

A daughter who does not call. A brother who was polite at a funeral and has not been in touch since. A friendship of twenty years that ended over a thing the man did and knows he did and cannot undo.

The specific torment in those is that the person is out there. They are having Tuesdays. It is not death, and so it feels like something that ought to be fixable, and so the man keeps trying, for years, and every attempt costs him something and lands nowhere.

I want to handle this carefully, because there is a version of this message that promises reconciliation, and I am not going to write that. I do not know whether they come back. Nobody does, and Scripture never once puts another person's will in your hands.

What Scripture does have is a scene where a man pleads for seven days for something to be reversed, and it is not, and what he does next is the most practical thing in the Old Testament.

Seven days, and then he gets up

David's child is dying, and the situation is a consequence of what he has done, and he knows it.

David therefore besought God for the child; and David fasted, and went in, and lay all night upon the earth. (2 Samuel 12:16, King James Version)

He does this for seven days. His servants are frightened to tell him when the child dies, because they assume the news will destroy him.

And this is what happens:

Then David arose from the earth, and washed, and anointed himself, and changed his apparel, and came into the house of the LORD, and worshipped: then he came to his own house; and when he required, they set bread before him, and he did eat. (2 Samuel 12:20)

Read the sequence. He gets up. He washes. He changes his clothes. He worships. He eats.

Every one of those is a body action, and they are in an order, and none of them is a feeling. He is not described as having accepted anything. He does five physical things and the acceptance is not mentioned.

You are able to do the next physical thing before any feeling arrives to authorize it. 2 Samuel 12:20 lists five bodily actions and no emotional state. It is the same Spirit, Romans 8:26 helping our infirmities, who supplies what a person cannot feel their way into.

The sentence he gives his servants

They ask him why, because it is the opposite of what everybody expected. And he says this:

But now he is dead, wherefore should I fast? can I bring him back again? I shall go to him, but he shall not return to me. (2 Samuel 12:23)

Two halves, and both are load bearing.

Can I bring him back again? He asks the question straight and answers it by asking it. He is finished pleading, not because he has stopped caring, but because the situation has changed from one where asking made sense to one where it does not.

I shall go to him, but he shall not return to me. That is a sentence about direction. He is not saying the relationship is over. He is saying the movement in it now goes one way, and it is his to make, in time, and not the other person's to reverse.

I have watched that sentence do more for people carrying an unreachable relationship than anything else I know. Not because it promises anything. Because it tells a man which direction is his to walk in.

You have a direction that is yours to walk even where a return is not on offer. 2 Samuel 12:23 says I shall go to him, but he shall not return to me. It is the Spirit of God, Galatians 5:22 naming longsuffering among His fruit, who supplies a direction a person cannot sustain on will.

The limit Paul puts on it, deliberately

Anybody who has spent years trying to repair something needs the sentence Paul writes with two explicit caps in it.

If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men. (Romans 12:18)

If it be possible. He grants that sometimes it is not.

As much as lieth in you. He caps the assignment at the part that is inside your reach and refuses to hand anybody a job that requires another person's cooperation.

That is not permission to give up. It is a boundary drawn by God around a task, so that a person can do their part and stop grading themselves on somebody else's decision.

I have watched men destroy themselves grading their own repentance by whether a daughter called back. Paul put a fence around that specifically so nobody would have to.

You are responsible for your side of it and nothing beyond your side of it. Romans 12:18 puts two limits on the assignment before the assignment is given, and it is His Spirit, Galatians 5:22 naming peace as fruit rather than as an outcome, who supplies what an unwilling second party cannot be made to give.

What David asks for afterward, and what he does not

Later, in the psalm he wrote about this whole period, he asks for something specific, and it is worth noticing what is missing from the request.

Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation; and uphold me with thy free spirit. (Psalm 51:12)

He does not ask for the situation to be undone. He is realistic and he is a king and he knows what is fixed.

He asks for joy to come back, and for something to hold him up, and then, two verses later, he starts talking about teaching other people God's ways. The restoration in that psalm turns outward almost immediately.

And Paul, who had a great deal behind him, describes what he does with what is behind:

forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before. (Philippians 3:13)

Not amnesia. He tells his own story constantly. He means he has stopped treating what is behind as the place where the answer lives.

You are able to have joy restored while a circumstance stays exactly where it is. Psalm 51:12 asks for the joy of Thy salvation rather than for the event undone. It is the Holy Spirit, whom that verse calls the free spirit that upholds a man, who does the upholding afterward.

And if what you have lost has begun to press on you harder than it did at the start, say it out loud to a person: a doctor, a counselor, a pastor you trust, or the 988 crisis line, which answers every hour there is. A man alone with an unreachable person is in a room that gets smaller, and it should not be a room with one door.