Everyone Is Against Me

Everyone is against Me
1 Samuel 18: 17- 19: 24

Last night I watched a Jordanian Oscar-nominated movie called Captain Abu Raed, whose central figure is an airport janitor at Amman Airport (just up the street from Jabesh-gilead, actually). In a subordinate plot point, he gets to know a woman called Nour who actually is a pilot. She is a successful woman in her thirties, but she has to endure her well-to-do father’s periodic attempts to marry her off to implausible suitors. Now, many people who had their marriages arranged by their parents comment on how well the system works. Indian author Farahad Zama describes how he met his wife only for forty-five minutes over tea; they fell in love after the wedding. But he would have had the chance to say no on the basis of the forty-five minutes, which is what Nour in the movie does in rather less than that time. The trouble is, the more important your father is, the more likely it is that the matches he devises will be driven by politics, and they will then take some resisting. While this does not entirely explain the problems of the British royal family we noted in the previous chapter, it is a contributory factor...