The biblical literature laments few losses so frequently as wasted opportunity. A leader emerges with something like a clean slate in his hand. Instead of noble lines, he scrawls the moral equivalent of excrement across the tablet.
It would have us develop an instinct for the same.
The Bible knows a thousands ways to spell such loss. It rues what might have been.
Jehoram dies unlamented, the worst of fates:
The LORD aroused against Jehoram the anger of the Philistines and of the Arabs who are near the Ethiopians. They came up against Judah, invaded it, and carried away all the possessions they found that belonged to the king’s house, along with his sons and his wives, so that no son was left to him except Jehoahaz, his youngest son.
After all this the LORD struck him in his bowels with an incurable disease. In course of time, at the end of two years, his bowels came out because of the disease, and he died in great agony. His people made no fire in his honor, like the fires made for his ancestors. He was thirty-two years old when he began to reign; he reigned eight years in Jerusalem. He departed with no one’s regret. They buried him in the city of David, but not in the tombs of the kings.
The man enjoyed good genes. Things might have been so very different.
Yet Jehoram failed at every point. A man of such privilege had almost to set his face against blessing and success and pursue failure with relentless fervor. Jehoram did just this.
His house was plundered, his lineage pruned, his bowels turned to useless, trembling, leaking flesh. He died weeping. Even the gravitas of his royal office earned him no favors. No fires were lit in his honor, no rump knot of supporters defied the masses for an hour of praise to his legacy. He was buried with paupers.
Jehoram is unremembered. OK. Worse has happened. But the man had Jehosaphat in his lineage.
He might have led Judah to blessing, to satiety, to peace.
He had no clue. Weeds cover his grave.
Canter Bridge 
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