Past Performance and Future Results

And now, my lord the king, the eyes of all Israel are on you, to tell them who shall sit on the throne of my lord the king after him. 1 Kings 1:20

When I came home from treatment back in 2014, I knew I’d found a lasting recovery and that my life was going to be different. My wife was not so confident. She’d trusted in my previous attempts at recovery and had been burned with each relapse. Observing my repeated failures, she had good reason to expect more failure. Past performance predicts future results. I can’t blame her. Fifteen years of drug use, lying, and erosion of trust isn’t undone in a month of treatment. So, she watched, wanting to know how I would respond. Would I commit to radical change for a while and then predictably slide into the old life? To protect herself, she had to prepare for that. Still, she held out hope, watching to see if the recovery I claimed was authentic. For her to begin to trust again, she needed to see radical change . . . for a long time. So, she waited, hoping for change but expecting failure.

This, I think, is the way Bathsheba looked at David in today’s passage. In the story, Adonijah (David’s son from Haggith) tried to wrestle the throne from his father. David had previously declared his intent for Solomon (David’s son from Bathsheba) to be king. Upon learning of Adonijah’s rebellion, the prophet Nathan went to Bathsheba, coaching her on how to approach King David with the news. She did as Nathan instructed but added this last accusation of her own. The kingdom is watching you to see if you’ll do anything (my paraphrase). We’d previously read that David never told Adonijah, “No”. Past performance predicts future results. Bathsheba and the kingdom were watching. Would King David once again sit on his hands while Adonijah stole the kingdom? Or would David toughen up and do what needed to be done? Bathsheba was worried that David would simply do nothing as he’d always done.

When I came home from treatment, I was a little offended that my wife didn’t believe in my transformation. Looking at it from her perspective though, I had to see that she was right to be skeptical. If I wanted her to believe in a different future, I couldn’t convince her with words. I had to convince her with my behavior. And that took a long time. For her to begin to trust, she had to be able to look back on at least a year, observing radical change. Past performance predicts future results. If I wanted her to believe, I had to permanently change my performance.