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his mouth.
    David gets worse before he gets better. He escapes to Gath, the hometown of Goliath. He tries to forge a friendship based on a mutual adversary. If your enemy is Saul and my enemy is Saul, we become friends, right?
    In this case, wrong.
    The Gittites aren’t hospitable. “Isn’t this David, the king of the land?” they ask. “Isn’t he the one the people honor with dances, singing, ‘Saul has killed his thousands, and David his ten thou-sands’?” (21:11 NLT).
    David panics. He’s a lamb in a pack of wolves. Tall men, taller walls. Piercing glares, piercing spears. We’d like to hear a prayer to his Shepherd; we’d appreciate a pronouncement of God’s strength. Don’t hold your breath. David doesn’t see God. He sees trouble. So he takes matters into his own hands.
    He pretends to be insane, scratching on doors and drooling down his beard. Finally the king of Gath says to his men, “‘Must you bring me a madman? We already have enough of them around here! Why should I let someone like this be my guest?’ So David left Gath and escaped to the cave of Adullam” (21:14–22:1 NLT).
    Dare we envision this picture of David? Staring with galvanized eyes. Quivering like jelly. He sticks out his tongue, rolls in the dirt, grunts and grins, spits, shakes, and foams. David feigns something like epilepsy.
    The Philistines believed “an epileptic was possessed by Dagon’s devil and that he made husbands impotent, women barren, children die, and animals vomit.” Fearing that every drop of an epileptic’s blood created one more devil, the Philistines drove epileptics out of their towns and into the desert to die. 1 And that’s what they do with David. They shove him out the city gates and leave him with nowhere to go.
    He can’t go to the court of Saul or the house of Michal, the city of Samuel or the safety of Nob. So he goes to the only place he can—the place where no one goes, because nothing survives. He goes to the desert, the wilderness. To the honeycombed canyons that overlook the Dead Sea. He finds a cave, the cave called Adullam. In it he finds shade, silence, and safety. He stretches on the cool dirt and closes his eyes and begins his decade in the wilderness.
    Can you relate to David’s story?
    Has your Saul cut you off from the position you had and the people you love?
    In an effort to land on your feet, have you stretched the truth? Distorted the facts?
    Are you seeking refuge in Gath? Under normal circumstances you would never go there. But these aren’t normal circumstances, so you loiter in the breeding ground of giants. The hometown of trouble. Her arms or that bar. You walk shady streets and frequent question-able places. And, while there, you go crazy. So the crowd will accept you, so the stress won’t kill you, you go wild. You wake up in a Dead Sea cave, in the grottoes of Adullam, at the lowest point of your life, feeling as dumb as a roomful of anvils. You stare out at an arid, harsh, unpeopled future and ask, “What do I do now?”
    I suggest you let David be your teacher. Sure, he goes wacko for a few verses. But in the cave of Adullam, he gathers himself. The faithful shepherd boy surfaces again. The giant-killer rediscovers courage. Yes, he has a price on his head. Yes, he has no place to lay his head, but somehow he keeps his head.
    He returns his focus to God and finds refuge.
    Refuge surfaces as a favorite word of David’s. Circle its appearances in the book of Psalms, and you’ll count as many as forty-plus appearances in some versions. But never did David use the word more poignantly than in Psalm 57. The introduction to the passage explains its background: “A song of David when he fled from Saul into the cave.”
    Envision Jesse’s son in the dimness: on his knees, perhaps on his face, lost in shadows and thought. He has nowhere to turn. Go home, he