Under The Eternal Blue

Of Kings and Servants

The qualification of a king is the life of a servant.
Hearing those words for the first time, it probably doesn’t make sense to you either. It’s all I heard back then and I believed it. Didn’t make sense but, an ideal is noteworthy in times where it’s harder to believe in yourself. If you were me, you wouldn’t have believed in me.

It’s crazy isn’t it, how sometimes, it’s either believe or die.
Death may be certain, but something you choose not to trust.
Hope may be uncertain, but something you choose to. So in the end, hope is scarier than death and yet, all we have sometimes.

Some helping hands are full of thorns but better than gaping holes. Deep, bitter and unforgiving chasms.

‘Perhaps,’ you think, ‘one day the sun will shine for me. The clouds will rain for me and those memories, will die for me.’

‘One day,’ you think, because you can’t help but count in uncertain expressions.
There’s too much you don’t know. And then that word surfaces again, hope. It doesn’t numb your wounds but makes you think it will all be worth it. So you keep counting.

One day starts to feel like the passing cars in the bus home. Lights fading into vanishing distance. Home is never where you are either. No, you live in the awesome flat called, ‘one day.’

Rent is free. Water is free. Life is, free. All you have to do, is close your eyes, breathe and you’re free.
When you’re a servant, you think freedom will bring you happiness. When you’re a king, you realize no one is free. I am bound to the king and the king is bound to me. I guess it’s something you can only learn once you’ve learnt to live for someone else.

The king is my hope, and I am his. I bear the burden of my problems and he bears the burden of me.
The qualification of a king is the life of a servant. A king can’t understand hopelessness by simply standing next to me.
The burden of a king is the lives of his people. To be sheltered from them, to have never known them, is to forfeit his role to passiveness.

And once you become king, you see more clearly the error of the servant. Mistaking power for freedom, all his desires become justified. And then that freedom becomes the grave of his servitude.

Servants can be selfish, but kings can’t afford to be. Servants can afford to despair, but even if kings do, they can’t really live there. Simply for the sake. Kings have to be more than they were, for the sake.
They live, for the sake. They die for the sake…

Some of us, just die. Some of us, just live. Our deaths don’t change anything.
Our lives don’t, change anything. And it’s comforting, to think they don’t have to. It’s harder to survive than to be a king. Rather, I’d say to be a king, one has to survive. 

Not all kings live in palaces. Not all kingdoms have kings either. Some, have servants. And not all servants, have the mindset of a king, simply because it’s what they are called.

If one day, you had to switch from answering for yourself, to answering for a people, I’m sure you’d learn something. That power isn’t what qualifies a king. Royal robes. Crowns. Thrones.

A king is a manifestation of his people, their hopes, their dreams, their struggles, their identity. He’s an undervalued parent that has to bear the madness of the diversity of his children. Some, who may never accept his leading. Others, who will never appreciate it. Those, who don’t understand him. Those who are not willing to.

A king can’t blame them because the qualification of a king is the life of a servant. Seeing the full picture is harder when your vantage point is in the valley. The higher you go, the clearer it becomes. A king understands that. A king should.

Being remembered isn’t the point. Though, I do wonder what life would feel like as a memory. Every king strives to gradually raise his people to where he is. Every parent does so.

‘Ahh, this is what my mother used to say.’

The point was always you. And when it finally becomes your turn, you cease to be the point. And that's when you finally, know what it means to become king, my son.