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An old man rubs his eyes and looks toward the light. The sun is shining in through the rough opening of a cave. He blinks the sleep away and sits up. Somewhere a baby is crying. A second baby joins. For a minute he forgets where he is. He turns his bearded face toward the noisy children and sees his two daughters nursing babies without modesty.
“I’ve asked you to get a blanket,” he mumbles.
His oldest daughter laughs. “What do you care, he’s your son too.”
Suddenly everything comes flooding back to him, a slap in the face. The man is Lot. Once a rich cattle baron. Nephew to the great Abraham. Owner of thousands of cattle and tens of thousands of sheep and goats. Lot crawls up off the gritty floor of the cave, wipes the sand from his knees, and stumbles out into the blazing sunny morning. He talks to himself.
“I once sat in the gates of Sodom, one of the great men of the city. People respected me. Gold. Silver. Land. Power. Fame. I had it all. And now my woman’s a statue of salt in the desert and I’m raising two sons born of incest.” Lot looked to the sky. To Abraham’s God. “Why?” he asked, not even angry anymore. He no longer had the strength to rage over his fall from grace.
How had it come to this?
Lot looked toward the horizon. After smoldering for a year or two, the smoke had finally cleared where Sodom and Gomorrah once stood. Lot remembered hesitating, trying not to leave the city where he had become so wealthy. When he tried to convince his sons-in-law to flee with him, they laughed, refusing to take the old man seriously. Had he really lost his credibility? Even in his own home?
Finally, two angels took him and his wife and daughters by the hand and pulled them out of town. But his wife kept looking back. Lot knew the look. It was the face she made when she wanted something she could not have. Suddenly she froze. God had turned her into a statue of salt, a creepy reminder of death and infertility: salt kills the grass that feeds the animals that made Lot wealthy.
Lot and his daughters had stumbled on into the mountains, making camp in a cave. They got him drunk, their own father. Blacked out. Too drunk to remember where those boys came from. Half-son, half-grandson, wholly illegitimate.
Then Lot remembered his last night in Sodom. The night he tried to protect God’s messengers by offering his daughters to sport the crowd. Those men would have killed the girls. Then the angels blinded the crowd. But it did not slow the men down. They were in a frenzy; even blind they wanted to have their way. But God confused them, and they could no longer find the door.
The valley stretching before Lot was desolate. It had been burned black in the beginning, but the rains had washed it a dull gray. Nothing grew. Acres and acres lost. The fertile valley where Lot’s herds once grew fat was gone, a rocky, alkali desert in its place. Nothing would grow there again, certainly not during Lot’s lifetime.
How had it come to this?
Suddenly he heard the voice of Abram all those years ago:
We have grown too wealthy, you and me. There is not room for both your herds and mine.
“‘Is not the whole land before thee? Separate yourself from me. If you will take the left hand, then I will go to the right. If you depart to the right hand, then I will go to the left.’
And Lot lifted up his eyes and beheld all the plain of Jordan, that it was well watered everywhere … even as the garden of the Lord … then Lot chose all the plain of Jordan and Lot journeyed east and they separated” Genesis 13:9-11.
Lot shook his head at the memory, talking to himself:
“My uncle gave me first choice. It was his by right and by age. But he let me choose and I chose selfishly, putting riches before family. I dragged my wife and kids into a city no child should have to grow up in. I rubbed elbows with the city fathers and became one of them. Father to a city of godless animals who rape every traveler seeking shelter.”
In the distance a vulture soared on the hot, dry winds. There were too many vultures now. Too much death. Farmland where nothing would grow. A rich valley in ruins. Lot shook his head at the memory.
“I once thought this place was the garden of the Lord. As rich as the Nile Delta. As Eden. Now look at it. Rocks and rubble and sand and salt. A wasteland.”
Lot took a few steps toward the dirty cave that had become his home. In the gloomy shadows a baby cried. Suddenly the man turned back to the sun glaring off the rocky waste where his herds once grazed and sat down and wept.
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“Walk with the wise and you will become wise, but a companion of fools suffers harm” Proverbs 13:20.
“Do not be deceived: Bad company corrupts good morals” 1 Corinthians 15:33.
“The righteous choose friends carefully” Proverbs 12:26.
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