SDfAoWOP: Abigail

Day Twenty

I Samuel 25:18-19

Then Abigail made haste and took two hundred loaves and two skins of wine and five sheep already prepared and five seahs of parched grain and a hundred clusters of raisins and two hundred cakes of figs, and laid them on donkeys. And she said to her young men, “Go on before me; behold, I come after you.” But she did not tell her husband Nabal.

A wise woman, as they say, builds her home. She knows the measure of her substance. She thinks and acts in moments of crisis and evil. She takes care for the preservation of the life of her husband and all those in her care. When she hears the awful news, that Nabal wouldn't give time or interest for a man of power and grace, who had done good and not evil, who had looked to the property of others and not only to his own, when she hears the awful news, she doesn't sit back and wring her hands. She doesn't just blame him and then wait for whatever will come. She doesn't go down to the local office and file a complaint. She gathers a lot of food. Bread, grain, raisins, cakes of figs, sheep. And wine. And she makes haste. She hurries. She throws herself in the way interceding for another. That the other, the husband, doesn't deserve it, makes it all the more a matter of love.