Tiger the Teenager
1 Kings 11:1
But king Solomon loved many strange women, together with the daughter of Pharaoh, women of the Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Zidonians, and Hittites
Solomon was around the age of 18 when he became King of Israel. Most 18 year old you wouldn't want running a Chuck E. Cheese, let alone a country surrounded by enemies. Yet, Solomon prayed for wisdom and God gave it to him, to rule the people. The interesting and ironic thing is that Solomon was a much better king as teenager than when he was older. The wisdom God had given to him, a gift greater than gold, created in Solomon pride. And, pride comes before the fall.
Matthew Henry says of this verse and of Solomon: "This chapter begins with as melancholy a "but" as almost any we find in all the Bible. Hitherto we have read nothing of Solomon but what was great and good; but the lustre both of his goodness and of his greatness is here sullied and eclipsed, and his sun sets under a cloud." Praise be to God that the Bible is so honest about its heroes. Brutally honest. No hagiography here.
As the scorching Florida sun, the rays of celebrity, are certainly burning Tiger Woods right now. If one is to believe the tabloids, he is in the running to outpace Solomon in the women he has had sexual dalliances with and society is licking its lips in salacious delight. We like to see the mighty fall. There is also a peculiar envy and voyeurism when we hear about "how many" and "who."
Yet, like Solomon writing the book of Ecclesiastes in his old age after his sexual romps had come to an end, everything is vanity. The pleasure of sin never triumphs over the pain of sin. God has seen to it; it just takes time for the accounts to come in. And, only Christ can reconcile that spread sheet (the financial analogies to redemption, credits/debits, and the like, are deep).
As a school counselor, I am trained to help adolescents think beyond the temporary and to try and have them grasp their long-term future, whether it is college and/or career-planning or shunning destructive behavior like sleeping around and getting drunk. My goal is to extend their perspective so that the common temptations of being a teenager are put into a larger context of getting them to realize that what starts in the teenager years (unlike Las Vegas) does not stay in the teenage years. Lifelong patterns are created where it can be extremely difficult to exonerate one from later in life. Addictions, poor educational achievement, having children out of wedlock and or/abortions, criminal behavior, and etc. don't just end in terms of consequences when that teen turns 20.
I am fairly certain that when Tiger was a teenager he probably played golf for more hours in a day than he slept. I am surmising that he probably didn't spend a lot of time dating, going to proms, and having a first love. This appears to have created in him, now that he is a man, to get "his" since he didn't get his when young. But, he never learned the lesson that you can't "F*** Around" without paying some serious relational consequences. But, now instead of him learning those lesson when he was a kid, he is now on the world's stage. How awful.
When considering sinful behaviors, we have to think about the context and circumstances. Tiger lost a lot of his life to become the world's greatest golfer. His single-mindedness in golf necessitated the denial of almost everything else. The blow-back on such a trajectory can be an insatiable desire to go back and relive what never was but what one imagines it could have been.
One of Tiger's supposed mistresses, Rachel Uchitel lost her fiancee in 9-11. If so, I can see how she would throw caution to the wind and decide to be promiscuous to get ahead. She had loved and lost and loss does strange things to people. Maybe it is her wrong way, but understandable, of trying not to care anymore as she and Tiger descended into their Ambien-hazed activities. Live for the moment, for it is all we have. Or maybe, she does care but she realizes that everything is so temporary that if you don't grab all you can get now, you may lose everything in a moment. Who really knows.
The other day I overhead that Jackson 5 song, "I'll Be There." Michael Jackson was 12 years old when he sang that love song in 1970. It is really not right to have a child sing a love song. When M.J.was alive, like Tiger it seems, he had a preoccupation to return to the "Neverland" of his lost youth. It makes me sad to think that he is no longer here to fulfill his 'I'll Be There" lyric.
But God is...
But king Solomon loved many strange women, together with the daughter of Pharaoh, women of the Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Zidonians, and Hittites
Solomon was around the age of 18 when he became King of Israel. Most 18 year old you wouldn't want running a Chuck E. Cheese, let alone a country surrounded by enemies. Yet, Solomon prayed for wisdom and God gave it to him, to rule the people. The interesting and ironic thing is that Solomon was a much better king as teenager than when he was older. The wisdom God had given to him, a gift greater than gold, created in Solomon pride. And, pride comes before the fall.
Matthew Henry says of this verse and of Solomon: "This chapter begins with as melancholy a "but" as almost any we find in all the Bible. Hitherto we have read nothing of Solomon but what was great and good; but the lustre both of his goodness and of his greatness is here sullied and eclipsed, and his sun sets under a cloud." Praise be to God that the Bible is so honest about its heroes. Brutally honest. No hagiography here.
As the scorching Florida sun, the rays of celebrity, are certainly burning Tiger Woods right now. If one is to believe the tabloids, he is in the running to outpace Solomon in the women he has had sexual dalliances with and society is licking its lips in salacious delight. We like to see the mighty fall. There is also a peculiar envy and voyeurism when we hear about "how many" and "who."
Yet, like Solomon writing the book of Ecclesiastes in his old age after his sexual romps had come to an end, everything is vanity. The pleasure of sin never triumphs over the pain of sin. God has seen to it; it just takes time for the accounts to come in. And, only Christ can reconcile that spread sheet (the financial analogies to redemption, credits/debits, and the like, are deep).
As a school counselor, I am trained to help adolescents think beyond the temporary and to try and have them grasp their long-term future, whether it is college and/or career-planning or shunning destructive behavior like sleeping around and getting drunk. My goal is to extend their perspective so that the common temptations of being a teenager are put into a larger context of getting them to realize that what starts in the teenager years (unlike Las Vegas) does not stay in the teenage years. Lifelong patterns are created where it can be extremely difficult to exonerate one from later in life. Addictions, poor educational achievement, having children out of wedlock and or/abortions, criminal behavior, and etc. don't just end in terms of consequences when that teen turns 20.
I am fairly certain that when Tiger was a teenager he probably played golf for more hours in a day than he slept. I am surmising that he probably didn't spend a lot of time dating, going to proms, and having a first love. This appears to have created in him, now that he is a man, to get "his" since he didn't get his when young. But, he never learned the lesson that you can't "F*** Around" without paying some serious relational consequences. But, now instead of him learning those lesson when he was a kid, he is now on the world's stage. How awful.
When considering sinful behaviors, we have to think about the context and circumstances. Tiger lost a lot of his life to become the world's greatest golfer. His single-mindedness in golf necessitated the denial of almost everything else. The blow-back on such a trajectory can be an insatiable desire to go back and relive what never was but what one imagines it could have been.
One of Tiger's supposed mistresses, Rachel Uchitel lost her fiancee in 9-11. If so, I can see how she would throw caution to the wind and decide to be promiscuous to get ahead. She had loved and lost and loss does strange things to people. Maybe it is her wrong way, but understandable, of trying not to care anymore as she and Tiger descended into their Ambien-hazed activities. Live for the moment, for it is all we have. Or maybe, she does care but she realizes that everything is so temporary that if you don't grab all you can get now, you may lose everything in a moment. Who really knows.
The other day I overhead that Jackson 5 song, "I'll Be There." Michael Jackson was 12 years old when he sang that love song in 1970. It is really not right to have a child sing a love song. When M.J.was alive, like Tiger it seems, he had a preoccupation to return to the "Neverland" of his lost youth. It makes me sad to think that he is no longer here to fulfill his 'I'll Be There" lyric.
But God is...
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