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.

#Advent #love #Rahab