The Man On The Hillside
Colin’s father has not softened.
I keep waiting as though it were simply long dry season to break, and the years go by and it just doesn’t. If anything the hardness has set. Whatever wound he carries (and I believe he carries one, though I’ve never understood where it came from), it has had decades to harden into something permanent, and the voice that comes out of it now is a mocker’s voice. Its incredibly sad. And destructive.
It was only a short while in our relationship before his mental state started significantly declining, and if I’m candid, that stretch was survivable mostly because I worked nights. We were rarely awake in the same house at the same time. But a voice like his doesn’t need that kind of nearness to hurt others because it gets into the walls of an offenders heart.
Court showed it as plainly as anything could. In the middle of trial, with the judge listening, he laughed heartily and asked me how many failed relationships I’d had since our divorce. He wasn’t asking for information. He wanted to intentionally wound me. As he grinned, I saw he was hoping for me to show an outburst, some sadness, or some flash of emotion he could hand the judge as evidence, because his entire case rested on the idea that Colin should not have a mother in his life anymore. He lost. He lost nearly everything he came into that room to win, and he has spent the time since looking for smaller levers to pull.
I sat through it with what the people who know me call my clinical pharmacist face. Level, composed, a little cool. It serves me well, and it isn’t a mask exactly. But underneath it I bleed more than I let anyone see.
The hardest part is that there’s no leaving.
In any other relationship I could close the door, and I have closed doors before. But he is Colin’s father, and as long as I’m in Colin’s life (which is to say, always), he will be somewhere on the edge of mine. So I keep my boundaries, and they help, and the ambushes come anyway.
More than once I’ve told him I’m not his enemy. I meant it every time. He rejected it every time too. To him, anything short of total compliance to his preferences reads as opposition. I don’t understand wanting that kind of control over another person….. I doubt I ever will.
King David had a man like this.
When David fled Jerusalem during Absalom’s rebellion, a man named Shimei came out of Bahurim to meet him on the road and cursed him the entire way. He threw stones at the king and his servants. He called him a man of blood and a worthless man. Abishai, one of David’s commanders, asked the obvious question: “Why should this dead dog curse my lord the king? Let me go over and take off his head” (2 Samuel 16:9).
David told him to leave Shimei alone. “It may be that the LORD will look on the wrong done to me, and that the LORD will repay me with good for his cursing today” (16:12).
And then comes this verse: “So David and his men went on the road, while Shimei went along on the hillside opposite him and cursed as he went and threw stones at him and flung dust” (16:13).
Shimei didn’t curse once and go home. He walked parallel to David along the ridge, keeping pace with him for miles. You can’t outrun a man who has decided to follow you. That’s the closest picture I’ve found of co-parenting with someone like Colin’s father. He’s on the hillside opposite the road, and he keeps pace.
What strikes me about David is that he didn’t climb up the hillside to fight. He kept walking the road. But he also didn’t pretend the cursing was harmless; he called it “the wrong done to me” and handed the reckoning to God. And that wasn’t the end of Shimei’s story. When David returned victorious, Shimei came groveling, and David spared him (2 Samuel 19:18-23). Years later, on his deathbed, David told Solomon not to hold Shimei guiltless (1 Kings 2:8-9). Restraint in the moment and justice in its season turned out to be the same story. I find that both comforting and unsettling.
I’ve noticed the voice I hear isn’t only his.
The Hebrew word satan means adversary, and in Job and Zechariah it appears with the article, ha-satan, the accuser. It’s a courtroom title. Revelation calls him “the accuser of our brothers… who accuses them day and night before our God” (12:10). Day and night. That’s the rhythm of an ambush that never quite stops.
When Colin’s father mocks me, I’ve come to think the accuser is borrowing a willing mouth. I don’t say that to make the man into the devil. Jesus said “Get behind me, Satan” to Peter, His own friend, minutes after blessing him (Matthew 16:23), which tells me the accuser can speak through almost anyone, including people who claim to love God. The script is much older than the man reading it.
That distinction has helped me more than I expected. I can refuse the script without needing to hate the man.
Zechariah gives a scene I’ve started rereading on the hard days.
Joshua the high priest stands before the angel of the LORD, and Satan stands at his right hand to accuse him (Zechariah 3:1). The right hand was the place of the prosecutor in an ancient court; Psalm 109 uses the same position. And Joshua is dressed in filthy garments.
What I can’t get over is that the LORD doesn’t dispute the filth. He rebukes the accuser instead. “Is not this a brand plucked from the fire?” (3:2). Then He orders the filthy clothes removed and clean vestments put on, and tells Joshua, “I have taken your iniquity away from you” (3:4). Through the entire scene, Joshua never says a word. He doesn’t argue his own case. The defense comes from the bench.
Some of what Colin’s father says has a sliver of fact in it, enough to catch onto something. My life has had its losses; relationships have ended. The accuser’s craft is turning facts into a verdict, and the verdict was never his to give. Paul uses courtroom language for this too: “Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn?” (Romans 8:33-34). I’ve sat in an actual courtroom being accused by a man who wanted to take my son. That verse reads differently to me now.
I sometimes wonder if part of his campaign is to make me look like too much trouble for anyone else to come near. Maybe it is. But a brand plucked from the fire is scorched, and it’s also been pulled out by a hand, on purpose, for a reason. I’d rather be that than unmarked and left in the coals.
The unflattering part to this, though, is about my pleading.
Proverbs is unusually blunt about one kind of person. “Whoever corrects a scoffer gets himself abuse… Do not reprove a scoffer, or he will hate you; reprove a wise man, and he will love you” (Proverbs 9:7-8). The scoffer, letz in Hebrew, is the one figure Proverbs treats as beyond the reach of argument.
Every time I’ve told him I’m not his enemy, I’ve been offering reproof to a scoffer and receiving exactly the abuse Proverbs promised. And I’ve had to ask myself why I keep doing it. I think some of my pleading isn’t for him at all. It’s for me. It’s the hope that if I find the right words, he’ll stop, and I’ll finally be free.
Which makes me wonder if the chain I most need to break isn’t his grip on me but my hope that he’ll let go of his end. I can’t make him release it. I can stop pulling against it as though my pulling will change his mind.
Paul wrote to the Philippians from chains, and he noticed something about the people around him: “most of the brothers, having become confident in the Lord by my imprisonment, are much more bold to speak the word without fear” (Philippians 1:14). His chains didn’t fall off. The people watching drew courage from how he wore them.
My son is 12, and he is studying how I carry this. By his father’s own account, he’s quiet and careful in that house. In mine, he talks my ear off. I want him to learn something besides how to keep his head down. I want him to see a person stay kind without becoming a doormat, hold boundaries without turning bitter, and keep her faith while a man who claims the same faith behaves this way.
I’m also starting to think he needs to see a little of what’s under the clinical face. Not all of it. But enough to know that grief isn’t the same as weakness, and that you can be wounded and still be standing.
The chapter in Samuel doesn’t end with Shimei.
After all those miles of stones and dust along the hillside, the text says simply that the king and the people with him came to the Jordan weary, “and there he refreshed himself” (2 Samuel 16:14).
I don’t know when Colin’s father will run out of stones, or whether he ever will. But the road David was on led to water, and Shimei’s voice isn’t mentioned again on the riverbank. I’m still walking the road. I’m trying to keep my eyes on where it goes instead of on the man keeping pace above it.
