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The Song of Solomon, Part 13b – Sick With Love, Not Sick of It

Two Kinds of Sickness

[Study Aired October 16, 2026]

Preface:

Everyone knows a love that curdled. You watched it happen to a friend, or you did it yourself: the person who was adored with astonishing intensity in the first weeks, and who could not bear the sound of the same voice by the third month. The adoration was real, in that the feeling was real. This study cannot leave unanswered what it was adoration of, because Scripture sets two sick people side by side, one in a palace garden and one in a palace bedroom, and asks which of them you resemble.

Son 2:5 Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples: for I am sick of love.

No extravagance of love is spared in this verse. Her curse, reversed, releases every glorious, feminine, nuanced, God-designed bliss upon her Husband for his ministration. And in doing so she knows, from her own flesh’s experience of men’s lustful responses, that He will respond in a way carnally unlike any man since creation — now spiritually. Here is the verse exactly as the lexicon sees it.

Son 2:5  Stay [H5564] me with flagons [H809], comfort [H7502] me with apples [H8598]: for [H3588] I [H589] am sick [H2470] of love [H160].

A note before the words are opened. The Shulamite is not sick of love, as one is sick of a food eaten too often. She is lovesick, positively: weakened, trembling, undone by the fullness of what she is moving toward. The negative form of the same sickness has a name in Scripture, and he is the other patient in this study.

Stay Me, Spread Me, Press Me, Burn Me

Stay — H5564 camak
1. to lean, lay, rest, support, put, uphold, lean upon.

This is the verb for laying a hand on the head of a sacrificial animal — the act of leaning your whole weight, and your whole identity, upon the offering.

Lev 1:4 And he shall put his hand upon the head of the burnt offering; and it shall be accepted for him to make atonement for him.

Psa 119:116 Uphold me according unto thy word, that I may live: and let me not be ashamed of my hope.

Her request is therefore not a request for a pillow. It is the language of the altar. Stay me: let me lean my entire weight on the Offering, and let it hold me up. Anyone who has ever collapsed into a chair at the end of a day that took everything knows the physical memory; anyone who has ever had no one to lean upon knows the other.

Flagons — H809 ’ashiyshah
1. raisin-cake, used in sacrificial feasts; consistently translated in the Authorised Version as flagon of wine.
Origin: from H808 — with the sense of pressing down, foundation; from the same as H784 — fire; flames; supernatural fire; buttress, support.

Fruit pressed flat under weight into a cake; a thing made firm and supportive by being crushed; rooted in fire. The Bride has already been ground to powder; here the powder has become a foundation.

2Sa 6:19 And he dealt among all the people, even among the whole multitude of Israel, as well to the women as men, to every one a cake of bread, and a good piece of flesh, and a flagon of wine. So all the people departed every one to his house.

Hos 3:1 Then said the LORD unto me, Go yet, love a woman beloved of her friend, yet an adulteress, according to the love of the LORD toward the children of Israel, who look to other gods, and love flagons of wine.

The same word appears in two contexts. In David’s feast, it is a king’s bounty shared with all his people. In Hosea, it is what the adulteress loves instead of her Husband. Flagons are not the problem. What they are loved instead of is what matters. As earlier studies note, flagons point directly to the richness of the wedding: the best wine reserved for the last Wife of our Lord, ironically becoming the first, as the sensuality in the first verse of the Song expressed her effervescence: “Let him kiss me, for thy love is better than wine.”

Comfort — H7502 raphad
1. to spread; (Qal) to spread; (Piel) to spread out, support.
Apples — H8598 tappuwach
1. apple, apple tree, apples; from H5301 naphach: to breathe, blow, sniff at, seethe, give up or lose (life).

Spread beneath her, supported by apples: breath, in other words, laid out like bedding. It is the same breath of the apple tree under which she was raised up and under which she sat in delight, and no one who has heard the breathing of someone they love in the dark needs this explained—but I will: “As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God” – Psa 42:1 (Jer 2:24, Eze 23:20. (Interestingly, harts and doves have the same soft expression in their eyes)

Sick — H2470 chalah
1. to be or become weak, be or become sick, be or become diseased, be or become grieved, be or become sorry
Belonging to the family of H2342 chuwl: to twist, whirl, dance, writhe, fear, tremble, travail, be in anguish; and of H2490 chalal: to profane, defile, pollute, desecrate, begin.

On the surface of understanding, and in the negative, this family is indicative of her arch-nemesis, the Great Whore — the evil flesh she is while flesh.

Love — H160 ’ahabah
1. love; from H157 ahab, to love.

Isa 66:8 Who hath heard such a thing? who hath seen such things? Shall the earth be made to bring forth in one day? or shall a nation be born at once? for as soon as Zion travailed, she brought forth her children.

Notice what the family of one root can hold. Trembling, dancing, writhing, travailing: the same verbs describe a woman in the grip of love and a woman in labour, and Zion bringing forth her children is, and in its time, the verb at its most glorious. The same family also contains profaning, and, in the same breath, beginning. Whatever is opened before its appointed hour is profaned, and whatever is opened at its hour is a beginning. That is the whole of the charge she will give the daughters of Jerusalem two verses from now: do not stir it up, do not open it, until he please.

Jer 31:3 The LORD hath appeared of old unto me, saying, Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee.

The love in her sickness is the same word as the everlasting love in Jeremiah, and the verb that follows it in that verse is the word studied earlier for drawn — dragged — mashak. She is sick with a love that came first from Him, and that dragged her here by lovingkindness.

The Other Sick Man

2Sa 13:2 And Amnon was so vexed, that he fell sick for his sister Tamar; for she was a virgin; and Amnon thought it hard for him to do any thing to her.

Vexed — H3334 yatsar
1. to bind, be distressed, be in distress, be cramped, be narrow, be scant, be in straits, make narrow, cause distress, besiege.

The same meaning as the bundle of myrrh — H6887 tsarar: to bind, be narrow, be in distress, make narrow, cause distress, besiege, be straitened, be bound.

Pro 13:12 Hope deferred maketh the heart sick: but when the desire cometh, it is a tree of life.

And, like Adam was effectively sick with love for Eve to not be her head, he had a greater passion for the flesh…

 Eph 5:30 For we are members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones.

Set the two sick people next to each other, and the Hebrew performs the autopsy. Her sickness is lovesickness that makes her lean, spread, and trust. His is the sickness of the bound myrrh: cramped, besieged, narrowed, straitened. The word that describes him is the word that described Solomon, wounded by his thousand wives, as Christ was on the cross. One man is bound by what he does not have the right to take. The other is bound by what he has never been offered.

The term stay, with its sense of leaning, holding, and being close, is starkly negative in his account and equally positive in hers. Both of them want closeness. One wants it given; one arranges to have it extracted. Amnon, besotted, further inflamed his own condition by asking that Tamar bake cakes “in his sight”. He, like Adam and all men who mostly inwardly, and the more boorish outwardly, neigh after the ‘free’ exhibition (ironically enslaved) of female flesh.

Eph 4:19 Who, being past feeling, have given themselves over unto lasciviousness, to work all uncleanness with greediness [Hence, the 40,000 plus Christian Orthodoxy].

Cakes — H3823 labab
1. to ravish, become intelligent, get a mind; (Niphal) to take heart, become enheartened, become intelligent; (Piel) to ravish the heart, encourage, make heart beat faster.
2. (Piel) to make cakes, bake cakes, cook bread.

Raisin cakes and apples are highly synonymous with lovemaking in the Hebrew imagination, and the queen of heaven’s devotees knew it.

Jer 44:19 And when we burned incense to the queen of heaven, and poured out drink offerings unto her, did we make her cakes to worship her, and pour out drink offerings unto her, without our men?

Isn’t Jer 44:19 dreadfully telling, because Jer 44:15 identifies the “we”:

Jer 44:15 Then all the men which knew that their wives had burned incense unto other gods, and all the women that stood by, a great multitude, even all the people that dwelt in the land of Egypt, in Pathros, answered Jeremiah, saying,
Jer 44:16 As for the word that thou hast spoken unto us in the name of the LORD, we will not hearken unto thee. 

That denotes the entirety of Israel, signified by Solomon’s 1,000 wives and Orthodox Christianity this very day, all emblematically burning incense to “another Jesus”, whom the Bride assuredly does not want her love awakened to minister in Abishag-like devotion. This is pure Suffragette’s Adamic gifted power at one of its earliest inaugurations: its rulership over men, and a distinct ridicule of the Priests and husbands.

Isa 4:1 And in that day seven [All of Israel, the churches] women shall take hold of one man, saying, We will eat our own bread, and wear our own apparel: only let us be called by thy name, to take away our reproach.

Amnon insisted that Tamar bake in his sight, and then eat in his bedroom, because he was feeding a fire. He was working himself, most openly and most embarrassingly, into a condition that modern medicine can name in the plainest clinical terms: pelvic congestion, the physical binding and besieging that the Hebrew had already named long before. He was not bringing every thought into Christ’s obedience. He was feeding them. The Shulamite does the opposite, fiercely, which is why, four times in the Song, she pre-emptively halts the very process that was tormenting him: I charge you, O daughters of Jerusalem, that ye stir not up, nor awake my love, until he please. The number four, meaning the whole of a thing being considered, and tribulation—and Amnon warred most brazenly to get that idol of his heart.

2Co 10:3 For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war after the flesh:
2Co 10:4 (For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God [spiritually] to the pulling down of strong holds;)
2Co 10:5 Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ;
2Co 10:6 And having in a readiness to revenge all disobedience, when your obedience is fulfilled.

Amnon’s desire for Tamar is the desire of many young men, and of older men who were never taught otherwise: the belief that a woman’s desire is the same machinery as his own. His is spontaneous, and arrives on its own. Hers, since the Edenic curses overwhelmingly, is at best, temperamentally responsive, and arrives in a dozen different answers. The man who does not know this will read a woman’s politeness and smile as an amplification of her inherent beauty, an invitation; her hesitation as a game; and her refusal as coyness, and then he will proceed, unrefined and goatish, in the confidence that she must be ravished as he is. Ahola and Aholibah do not help such men. Their escapades convinced generations of observers that all women were that easily and mechanically aroused; what those two women were seeking was not, at least initially, erotic at all. It was psychological. It was the breathless banking of as many dashing attentions as they could collect—a universal condition of young women bruised, too soon psychologically (spiritually) growing “old in adulteries”.

Eze 23:43 Then said I unto her that was old in adulteries, Will they now commit whoredoms with her, and she with them?

What God Is Doing With a Man Like This WHEN LUST WEARS THE FACE OF LOVE

The question must be asked honestly, because a reader who suppresses it will answer it wrongly: why does Scripture record, in such detail, apart from the nameless Levite man’s raped concubine in Judges 19, one of the worst outward lusts in the Old Testament, and why is it said that the Lord used it? The apostle supplies the mechanism, and it does not require God to personally implant an alien desire in anyone when he has an excellent lying Edenic servant, the Serpent, to do His will. We have an immense proclivity to condemn others’ sins while overlooking our own wrongdoing.

Jas 1:14 But every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed.
Jas 1:15 Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death.

Jdg 21:25 In those days [Today in Babylon!] there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes.

God uses the desires already inherent in the natural man to fulfil His sovereign purpose. Amnon’s appetite is brought into the light, where nobody can pretend it is mere weakness. A lust that large cannot be called a slip. It is the carnal heart at full volume, and that volume makes the contrast possible.

The deepest lesson, the one that makes this account about the reader instead of Amnon, is that carnal love is self-love. Amnon wanted Tamar for what she could give him. Once he had consumed and spent what he wanted, the supposed love turned into hatred.

2Sa 13:15 Then Amnon hated her exceedingly; so that the hatred wherewith he hated her was greater than the love wherewith he had loved her. And Amnon said unto her, Arise, be gone.

Forced — H6031 ‘anah
1. to afflict, humble, oppress, force, ravish; to be bowed down.

2Sa 13:14 Howbeit he would not hearken unto her voice: but, being stronger than she, forced her, and lay with her.

Gen 34:2 And when Shechem the son of Hamor the Hivite, prince of the country, saw her, he took her, and lay with her, and defiled her.

Tamar, and the Carnal Man Within

Hear is the exact boundary of this typology before using it. Tamar was a victim. Nothing in the account places any fault with her, and no real victim of violation should ever read these pages as though their grief were a lesson about themselves. The shame in this account belongs entirely to the one who took. The typology works precisely because of that: Tamar, elsewhere in Scripture, identifies with the persecuted, lied-to, and abused Christ and His Christ, the Bride.

2Sa 13:19 And Tamar put ashes on her head, and rent her garment of divers colours that was on her, and laid her hand on her head, and went on crying.

Then the pairing falls into place: Amnon is the carnal man, and that carnal man is us. Tamar is Christ and His Christ, the spiritual woman, being used by the flesh that wants to possess the things of God while remaining governed by itself. And the ashes on her head are the grief the Elect come to feel, in time, when they finally see what they did with His truth. A particularly hard statement in this vein says that when we are given spiritual eyes, we recognise that you and I first defrauded and lay with Tamar. We are not allowed to stand outside the account and say that Amnon was a monster. We must say that Amnon is in me.

Rev 2:4 Nevertheless I have somewhat against thee, because thou hast left thy first love.

He is us when we leave our first love and go lukewarm. And the contrast could not be sharper. Amnon takes; Christ gives. Amnon uses; Christ sanctifies. Amnon’s desire ends in hatred; Christ’s love endures to the end. Christ does not consume His Bride for His own gratification. He gives Himself so that she may be saved and become His first fruit, saving the world.

Even the bread of the account is part of the picture. Unleavened barley cakes represent the unsullied, sinless Christ as our sacrifice, whom we polluted by our former ways. The prophet is told to bake them over the dung of man, in the sight of the people, as a picture of defiled bread—doctrines baked over our own waste. Just as Amnon wanted Tamar to cook in his sight, so is our lewd devotion to the queen of heaven a foul idol in ourselves.

Eze 4:12 And thou shalt eat it as barley cakes, and thou shalt bake it with dung that cometh out of man, in their sight.
Eze 4:13 And the LORD said, Even thus shall the children of Israel eat their defiled bread [doctrines] among the Gentiles, whither I will drive them.
Eze 4:14 Then said I, Ah Lord GOD! behold, my soul hath not been polluted: for from my youth up even till now have I not eaten of that which dieth of itself, or is torn in pieces; neither came there abominable flesh into my mouth.
Eze 4:15 Then he said unto me, Lo, I have given thee cow’s dung for man’s dung, and thou shalt prepare thy bread therewith.

The deepest lesson in Amnon’s account is not about him. It is about the reader. It is that carnal love is self-love, and the moment you recognise this, you recognise yourself.

Amnon wanted Tamar for what she could give him. Not for her good. Not for her flourishing. Not for her honour or her future. He wanted her to satisfy a hunger that was entirely his own. And this hunger felt like love. It felt so much like love that he became physically ill with desire, so vexed (yatsar—bound, cramped, besieged, straitened) that his body manifested his obsession as sickness.

But here is what proves it was never love at all:

2 Samuel 13:15 Then Amnon hated her exceedingly; so that the hatred wherewith he hated her was greater than the love wherewith he had loved her.

The moment the illusion shattered—the moment he possessed what he had obsessed over and discovered it was not what he promised himself it would be—his supposed love inverted into hatred greater than the love he had professed. This is not a man who loved and was disappointed. This is a man who never loved at all. What he felt was appetite. And appetite, once fed, turns to contempt for the plate it ate from.

This is the most reproducible pattern in human behaviour, and it is not confined to bedrooms:

Desire → Possession → Satisfaction → Contempt → Shame

It is the life-cycle of the new phone (thrilling arrival → possessing → first hint of staleness → contempt for what once enthralled you → shame medicated by seeking the next one). The new job. The new church. The new doctrine. The new friend. Even your approach to Christ Himself: you loved the feeling of His presence more than the Presence; you prayed when you wanted something and went silent when He wanted something; you kept the relationship for its returns and cooled when the returns diminished.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF POST-VIOLATION HATRED

To understand Amnon spiritually, you must first understand what happens psychologically in a man who violates another person and then hates her.

When Amnon forced Tamar (H6031 ‘anah: to afflict, oppress, force, ravish), he experienced a temporary intoxication—the obliteration of her “no” by his strength, the sensation of absolute dominance, the illusion that his will was the only reality that mattered. For those moments, he was not bound. He was boundless.

Then it ended. And the psychological architecture collapsed.

What follows is catastrophic: the perpetrator is suddenly forced to confront what he has done. His behaviour violently clashes with any lingering desire to view himself as a decent person. The mind cannot hold both truths simultaneously: “I am a good man” and “I just violated an innocent person.” Something has to break.

So the mind does what it does expertly—it externalises. It projects. Rather than accept the weight of what he has done, the violator turns his unbearable internal crisis outward, focusing all that chaos on the victim. Amnon began to despise Tamar—not because she was despicable, but because she was a living reminder of his own depravity. She witnessed what he had done. Her very existence accused him.

So his mind performed a grotesque inversion: he constructed a narrative in which she was the problem. She had tempted him. She had provoked him. She had allowed it. By despising her, he tried to shift moral culpability from himself onto her. In his mind, the victim became the perpetrator; the perpetrator, the victim.

But beneath this externalisation ran an equally toxic current: paralysing self-hatred. Not genuine remorse, but egocentric shame—the collapse of his own self-image, the exposure of his deepest, most monstrous impulses. He had crossed a line from which there was no return. The illusion of his control had shattered. And so he was trapped in a volatile, unstable psychological state: hating the victim to avoid guilt, while drowning in self-loathing for his inability to control his impulses.

This is not the psychology of a man overcome by passion. This is the psychology of a man whose ego has cannibalised his conscience.

THE SPIRITUAL MECHANISM—HOW THIS OPERATES IN YOUR LIFE

We need to understand this: the same mechanism operates spiritually.

When Scripture says Amnon “forced her” (‘anah), the word does not stop at sexual violence. It extends to every act of domination disguised as authority. To force another person spiritually is to enforce one’s own religious ideas or doctrines upon them, using strength, authority, fear, guilt, or religious power to dominate another’s faith and mind. The parent who wins arguments by volume. The pastor who closes discussion by implying that questions are rebellion. The husband who quotes a verse the way another man would raise a hand. The friend whose theology must be adopted by Thursday.

This is Amnon in a collar and tie. And he is not always loud.

The mechanism is identical. The perpetrator experiences a temporary sense of absolute dominance—the intoxication of making another person bend to his will. And then, when the victim fails to remain grateful, when they show the wound that was inflicted, when they dare to grieve what was taken—the supposed love inverts into resentment. “You’re ungrateful. You’re bitter. You’re not submitted. If you truly understood my love, you would see that what I did was for your good.”

The victim becomes the problem. The violator becomes the victim. The narcissistic inversion is complete.

But worse: you have done this to Christ.

You have wanted Him for what He could give you—comfort, answers, warmth, security, the feeling of being loved. You have pursued the intoxication of self-worship “against” the Worshipped. And the moment He asked something that cost you, the moment He said no to a prayer, the moment He called you to love someone you despised—your supposed love inverted into resentment. You began to resent Him. You began to pull away. You began to construct narratives in which His love was conditional, limited, insufficient. You became Amnon, violated and violating.

THE DIAGNOSIS—WHAT YOU MUST SEE

Women too, look at what you have been calling love. Run it through the sequence in Amnon’s room. There is something—a person, a congregation, a doctrine, a spiritual experience—that you pursue for what it gives. It was wonderful. You possessed it. The first flatness arrived. Then contempt crept into your tone when it asked something of you. Then you looked elsewhere, with the fresh energy of someone who had decided it was never really what you needed. You have told this story as maturity.

Say it without euphemism: You have taken more than you have given, and called the taking love.

You have prayed when you wanted something and gone silent when He (Christ) wanted something. You have loved the feeling of worship more than the Worshipped. You have kept friends for their use and cooled when the use ran out. And somewhere in you is a person you consumed and then could not stand to look at, who is still in the room.

What do you love Christ for? Answer without the old hymn Solomon’s wives render in vain repetition. If every comfort, answer, and warmth were withdrawn for a year, would the love remain, or would it turn, like Amnon’s, into a hatred of the One who stopped supplying it?

THE ONLY PATH FORWARD

Cease the taking. As a hopeful joint in the Bride, make yourself ready for Christ and for another Elect that you cannot possibly collect on—time unobserved, a service unmentioned, a gift with no credit attached. Begin leaning, in the sense of the altar: put your whole weight on the Offering of a blood sacrifice, not on your own record of devotion.

Confess the specific one you violated, by name, to Christ first. Not a generic confession. Name what you took. Name the way you turned on them when they disappointed you. Name the narratives you constructed to justify your contempt. Let Christ’s weight break you to “shivers” (Rev 2:27).

The Jealous Husband Who Is Not Amnon

Here is the sentence that most readers will not expect, and the one on which the whole comparison turns. The dreadful expressions of Amnon’s lust, negatively, shockingly to some, reflect Christ our Husband’s righteous jealous passion for the Bride He is faithfully bringing into completeness in Him and the Father.

Exo 20:3 Thou shalt have no other gods before me [For this cause, unrighteous lust].
Exo 20:4 Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image [like Tamar], or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth:
Exo 20:5 Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them [as did figuratively Amnon to Tamar]: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me;
Exo 20:6 And shewing mercy unto thousands [Emblematic of the 144,000, the few saved for the First Resurrection and marriage to Christ] of them that love me, and keep my commandments.

Zec 2:8 For thus saith the LORD of hosts; After the glory hath he sent me unto the nations which spoiled you: for he that toucheth you toucheth the apple of his eye.

The same intensity, pointed in two directions. Amnon’s love says, “I want her, as Samson wanted Delilah, because she satisfies me.” Christ’s love says: I will give myself so that Tamar may be saved and be My firstfruit, and so that she may, in turn, save the world. God is not endorsing Amnon’s lust. With dreadful effect, He uses Amnon’s evil to expose the difference between carnal love and His own, the same jealous love Solomon has for the Shulamite he is writing into existence, and the love Christ is developing in her today.

Pro 7:2 Keep my commandments, and live; and my law as the apple of thine eye.
Pro 7:3 Bind them upon thy fingers, write them upon the table of thine heart.
Pro 7:4 Say unto wisdom, Thou art my sister; and call understanding thy kinswoman:
Pro 7:5 That they may keep thee from the strange woman, from the stranger which flattereth with her words.

Son 8:4 I charge you, O daughters of Jerusalem, that ye stir not up, nor awake my love, until he please.
Son 8:5 Who is this that cometh up from the wilderness, leaning upon her beloved? I [Christ!] raised thee up under the apple tree: there thy mother [initially our Whore mother, and now, the Heavenly Jerusalem Mother, within] brought thee forth: there she brought thee forth that bare [is today, bearing] thee.

Leaning upon her beloved: the same verb as the first word of her request. The apple tree is the same tree, and the mother who brought her forth under it is no longer the whore she was born to, but the Jerusalem above, who is bearing her even now.

Closing: What You Take and Call Love

Look at what you have been calling love this year, and run it through the sequence in Amnon’s room. There is something — a person, a congregation, a doctrine, a devotional high — that you pursue for what it gives. It was wonderful. You possessed it. The first flatness arrived, and you called it a season. Then a slight contempt crept into your tone when it asked something of you, and then you went looking elsewhere with the fresh energy of someone who has decided it was never really what you needed. You have told this story as if it were maturity. Examine it as Amnon’s ledger: desire, possession, satisfaction, hatred, shame.

Say it without euphemism. You have taken more than you have given, and called the taking love. You have prayed when you wanted something and gone quiet when He wanted something. You have loved the feeling of worship more than the Worshipped. You have kept friends for their use, and cooled when the use ran out. And somewhere in you is a person you consumed and then could not stand to look at, who is still in the room.

What do you love Christ for? Answer without the old hymn. If every comfort, answer, and warmth were withdrawn for a year, would the love remain, or would it turn, like Amnon’s, into a hatred of the One who stopped supplying it?

Cease the taking. Today, make yourself ready for Christ and for another Elect that you cannot possibly collect on: time unobserved, a service unmentioned, a gift with no credit attached. Begin leaning, in the sense of the altar: put your whole weight on the Offering, not on your own record of devotion. Confess the specific one you consumed, by name, to Christ first and then, where it is possible and safe, to them. Let Christ repair what he wants repaired. And practise the sentence she opens with, the verse she opens with, every morning before the day can start asking things of you: stay me. Hold me up. I am gladly spontaneously lovesick for You, as You have always been in my darkened night, for me.

Your love is either the Bride’s, which gives, or Amnon’s, which takes and then loathes. This chapter offers no third love to hide in.

End of Part 13
Next: Son 2:6-7