There’s a strange little parable tucked into 1 Kings 20, easy to miss if you’re skimming for the main event. A prophet, in disguise, corners King Ahab with a story. A soldier has been given a prisoner to guard. Guard this man, he’s told. If the prisoner goes missing, your life is the price. Simple instruction. Clear stakes. Then comes the soldier’s account of what happened: “As your servant was busy here and there, he was gone.”
That’s it. No explanation of what “here and there” actually involved. No elaborate excuse. He wasn’t overpowered. He wasn’t tricked. He was simply occupied with other things while the one thing he had been charged with slipped away.
There are at least three uncomfortable questions underneath that story. The first is about identity: Who are you, and what has been entrusted to you because of it? The soldier wasn’t given a random assignment. He had been entrusted with something and was responsible for guarding it. Most of us are carrying more trust than we sometimes realize. It may be a responsibility at work, a relationship, a calling, or a part of our own character that someone else is quietly counting on us to protect.
The second question is simpler: What, exactly, were you asked to guard? The instruction in the story wasn’t vague. Guard this man. And much of what matters most in our own lives isn’t particularly mysterious either. We often know which relationships need our presence, which commitments deserve our attention, and which convictions we cannot afford to neglect. The problem is not always confusion about the assignment.
Which leads to the third question, and perhaps the most uncomfortable one: What keeps pulling you away from it? The soldier never tells us what “here and there” involved. I’ve come to think that may be the most revealing detail in the whole story. It isn’t always one dramatic betrayal that costs us the thing we were supposed to guard. Sometimes it’s the accumulation of small, forgettable diversions, each one harmless enough on its own, that eventually leaves us absent at the exact moment our presence was required.
It’s hard for me to read “busy here and there” now without thinking about how easy we’ve made it to be somewhere else.
A phone can turn almost every unoccupied second into an invitation to leave the moment we’re actually in. There is always something else to read, watch, answer, refresh, or react to. We can be physically present with the people who depend on us while our attention travels everywhere else. We can spend enormous energy maintaining connections with people far away while becoming strangely inattentive to the people across the room. We have become remarkably good at being “here and there.”
And none of this has to become a scandal before it matters. Important things are often lost much more quietly. Relationships can thin through accumulated inattention. A calling can be crowded out by more immediate demands. Convictions can weaken through a hundred small compromises. Work that only we were positioned to do can remain undone, not because we rejected it, but because we were always doing something else.
That is what unsettles me most about the soldier’s explanation. What was entrusted to him wasn’t taken by force. He simply looked up and discovered it was gone. There are things in our lives that will not announce themselves as they disappear. They will not compete well for our attention or send increasingly urgent notifications. They depend instead on our remembering that they were entrusted to us in the first place.
So perhaps the question isn’t whether we’re busy. Most of us are. The better question is whether, in all our movement between here and there, we are still guarding what we were given to guard. Because one day we may look up from everything that kept us occupied and discover that something we considered important is no longer there.
And the most honest explanation we have may also be the simplest: I was busy. Here and there.
(1 Kings 20:35-43)