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Read + Ruminate:: Read Joshua chapter 2 + chapter 6; Matthew 1:5; Hebrews 11:31, James 2:25 - Revolutionary Love in the Story of Rahab's Intervention
Rahab is our hospitable shalom-maker from the margins, an unlikely but redemptive co-witness for this season of Advent. She dared to draw from divine Love—unconventionally, unswervingly. A love that reminds us that Elohim reveals pathways for the shalom (wholeness, well-being) of all and especially those on the outskirts—personally + collectively.
*Worth noting - Rahab is the mother of Boaz, which makes Rahab the mother-in-love (law) of Ruth. Talk about women, daughters liberated on the outskirts—brought centerstage as joy + justice mothers on the redemptive, welcome committee. Asé + Amen.
Watch:: a 10-minute travel back into history/HERstory
Ponder:: Love
Love is about wholeness + connectivity + intervention—let's lean into the 'African Call for Life from An African Prayer Book':
Busy, “normal” people: the world is here.
Can you hear it wailing, crying, whispering?
Listen; The World is here.
Don’t you hear it,
Praying and sighing and groaning for wholeness?
Sighing and whispering: wholeness,
Wholeness, wholeness?
An arduous, tiresome, difficult journey
Towards wholeness.
God, who gives us strength of body, make us whole.
Wholeness of persons: well-being of individuals,
The cry for bodily health and spiritual strength
Is echoed from person to person, from patient to doctor.
It goes out from a soul to its pastor.
We busy “normal” people are sick
We yearn to experience wholeness in our innermost being,
In health and prosperity we continue to feel unwell
Unfulfilled or half-filled.
There is a hollowness in our pretended well-being:
Our spirits cry for the well-being of the whole human family.
...We yearn to be folded into fullness of life--together
Life, together with the outcast
The prisoner, the mad woman, the abandoned child;
Our wholeness is intertwined with their hurt
Wholeness means healing the hurt,
Working with Christ to heal the hurt
Seeing and feeling the suffering of others
Their loss of dignity is not their loss.
It is our loss of human dignity
We busy “normal” people.
The person next to you with a different language and culture
With a different skin or hair color--
It is God’s diversity, making an unbroken rainbow circle
Our covenant of peace with God, encircling the whole of humanity
… There is no wall
There is only God at work in the whole.
Heal the sores on the feet;
Salvage the disintegrated personality
Bind them back into the whole
For without that one we do not have a whole..
God who gives us strength of body, make us whole..
Listen + Linger:: Love songs by Peter Collins + Stevie Wonder
Links for further discovery
The Advent series page.
LEAVE A COMMENT: I enjoy listening + responding to your heart.
