Today we will finish our discussion of the story of David and Mephibosheth. We have talked about Mephibosheth’s tragedy, how in a moment he went from being a prince to an orphan, from royalty to exiled and from privileged to afraid, ashamed and even disabled. While Mephibosheth’s story is dramatic we all share in it, we have all had our lives changed in a moment. Like Mephibosheth, death touches us all, it changes us all, it hurts, it stings, it is something we were never meant to endure and so it is something we are often left not fully sure how to handle. Mephibosheth’s tragedy starts with loss, with the death of his father and grandfather but most of the time when we tell or hear his story we think mostly about his disability. For some reason, the part of the story that is truly tragic to us is that he was dropped in all of the commotion and his feet were broken and never healed correctly, leaving him, as the Bible says “lame” for the rest of his life. The truth is that his disability wasn’t nearly as tragic as his change of identity. Mephibosheth didn’t just lose the ability to walk, in the moments prior to that he lost his security, his protection, his provision and his future as he understood it. He lost a good family name, a loving father and an inheritance of plenty. I don’t know if we fully understand that Mephibosheth didn’t just lose his father and grandfather, he lost his king, his country, his hopes and his dreams; in a moment everything changed. Again, probably without the drama, but we have all been there, we have all had everything that we planned, expected and had known up until a certain moment change, the truth of the matter is that those moments don’t simply change what goes on around us, they often change us. This morning I want us to move through Mephibosheth’s tragedy and our own and begin to see that we are never left in that moment when everything changes, we are never left to find our own way, to figure things out or to simply give up. Before Mephibosheth was born a plan for his redemption had been made. His father Jonathan made a covenant with David, with the man that would be king after the moment of tragedy struck; it was a covenant that would provide for Mephibosheth, that would protect him and that would redeem him back to the table he was born to sit at. The part of the story that I believe is the most painful is that Mephibosheth spent over 20 years not knowing that provision was given and protection was in place. He spent over 20 years being told to be most afraid of the person that would actually show him the most love. He spent over 20 years of his life bound by tragedy when the freedom of redemption had already been prepared. Today what I want us to see is not that we are all broken in some manner, we know that already, I want us to see that there are two key obstacles in our lives and they are both working to keep us from moving forward, from being healed, from being redeemed and from being seated at the king’s table. There are two obstacles that we have to overcome: how we view ourselves and how we believe others view us. The real problem is that both of these things seem to point to our hearts, our lives and our hurts but in truth all they are doing is keeping our eyes set on what we have lost so that we never truly see the heart of the king. The story of Mephibosheth is not triumph in the midst of tragedy, it is the story of the heart of a king that would not leave his enemy to sit in his brokenness, it’s the story of all of us.