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The Cost of Loyalty

Jul 25, 2026·By Sue Chebaiki

I have been watching House of David these past weeks, two full seasons, and I cannot stop thinking about Jonathan.

Not David, the anointed one, the future king whose story everyone knows. Jonathan. The one standing beside him. The king's son who looked at the man who would take everything that was meant to be his, and chose him anyway.

I found myself asking, in the quiet after each episode, the kind of question that stays with you longer than you expect. Does this still exist? In this world, in this era, in the lives of ordinary people who are not kings or prophets or biblical figures, does this kind of loyalty still happen?

I am not someone who trusts easily. I will be honest about that. Something I witnessed decades ago, a betrayal that was not directed at me but close enough to feel, changed something in my capacity to believe that loyalty is guaranteed by blood, by proximity, or by the words people say. I learned early that loyalty is not a given. It is rare. And its absence, when you discover it, does not just hurt. It shifts the ground you were standing on.

So when I watch Jonathan, I watch him with the particular attention of someone who knows what the other thing looks like.

What strikes me most about Jonathan is not the grand gesture. It is the clarity. He knew. He knew that David was anointed, that the throne that was meant to pass to him would pass instead to this shepherd boy. He understood the full cost of what he was choosing. And he chose it anyway, not because he was weak, not because he did not value what he was giving up, but because his values mattered more to him than his crown. He was faithful to what was right. Even when right was the most expensive thing on offer.

That is the rarest form of loyalty. Not the loyalty that costs nothing. Not the loyalty that lasts only as long as it is convenient or reciprocal or safe. The loyalty that looks at the full price and pays it anyway because the alternative would require becoming someone you cannot respect.

But I want to be precise about something, because I think it matters enormously. Jonathan was not a Jonathan to everyone. His loyalty was not a general warmth distributed equally across all his relationships. It was specific. It was a covenant between two particular souls whose connection the scripture describes as a knitting together. He chose David. Consciously. Completely. And that specificity is what made it sacred rather than sentimental.

True loyalty in this form is not a personality trait. It is not something a person simply has and shares with the world. It is something that happens between two specific people when something in each of them recognises something in the other. Which means the question is not only where do I find my Jonathan. It is also whether I am capable of recognising my David when he or she arrives. The person whose soul calls out something in me that makes me willing to show up at full cost.

So how does one find a Jonathan in a world that so often offers something lesser?

I have come to believe it is less about finding and more about becoming. Karma, or whatever equivalent your spiritual tradition offers, is not simply reward and punishment. It is resonance. The loyalty you live, the values you refuse to compromise even when compromise would be easier, the faithfulness you bring to the people and the commitments that matter to you, these things create conditions. They do not guarantee outcomes. But they make certain encounters possible that would not otherwise be.

You do not find your Jonathan by searching. You become someone whose life, whose values, whose way of being in the world, makes that kind of covenant recognisable when it arrives.

I think about my twin boys when I sit with this. They are eight years old and they have each other in the way that only twins do, two people who arrived in the world together, who have never known a version of life without the other. I plant seeds in them as often as I can, quietly and repeatedly, about what it means to be there for one another. Not just when it is easy. When it costs something. I do not know what their lives will ask of them or of their bond. But I pray, with the particular faith of a mother who does not trust easily and has learned why, that they will be for each other what Jonathan was for David.

Not because blood guarantees it. Blood guarantees nothing. But because they are being raised to understand that loyalty is not a feeling. It is a choice. Made again and again, in small moments and large ones, to do what is right for the person you have chosen even when everything else pulls in a different direction.

Jonathan did not become David's Jonathan because he was born a certain way. He became it because when the moment arrived, he chose his values over his throne. That choice, made once and then again and then again, is what made him who he was.

We live in a world that makes that kind of loyalty feel almost naive. And yet I cannot stop believing it is possible. Not for everyone. Not in every relationship. But somewhere, in the right covenant between the right two souls, it still exists.

I have seen the other thing. I know what its absence costs. And I still believe in Jonathan.

And in a world that gives us every reason to stop hoping, choosing to hope anyway might be the most courageous thing we can do...

This piece reflects personal reflections and does not constitute clinical advice.