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The impact of your story, and why you should tell it
In isolation, the human experience can begin to feel unique. In the spaces of silence, we can begin to feel ashamed by our struggles, and the silence will grow louder still. It’s not long before we believe that we are broken or undeserving of love because we are just so uniquely bad. The sacred act of telling our stories not only breaks the silence and connects people together, but it takes the name of Jesus far and wide. Rahab reminds us that stories of God spread among people and hearers are often moved to greater depths of faith, service and understanding of who God is. “I know that He Lord has…
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God is BIGGER than your fears
You know that feeling. The pit in your stomach, pounding of your heart, and rush of your thoughts as you go from just the possibility of a job loss to being homeless on the streets all in a matter of seconds. Gripped by fear, although an imagined one. As I heard Jill Briscoe once say, “Women are a fear-driven, performance-oriented species.” Just catching the news during a day reminds me just how much fear is an ever-present emotion with me and with most women—real fears as well as imagined ones. Is it realistic to think we can live without fear? No! God knows this about us. When we are afraid,…
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Sheroes of the Bible
The last two months unfolded like an archeological dig. Week after week, I joined a group of women to unlock stories of the past, dust off musty translations, and peer into golden lives of unlikely sheroes. Who are these sheroes? Women easily overlooked, discounted, and even scorned.
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Mary Magdalene = #NotAProstitute
What do you get when you mix myth, legend, incorrect interpretation, and a dose of Hollywood all together? The misrepresented life story of Mary Magdalene—shaken, not stirred. For centuries Mary Magdalene’s reputation as a reformed prostitute has lived on, despite her official Roman Catholic exoneration from bad-girl status in the 1960s. Just do a simple online search for Mary Magdalene and you’ll quickly feel overwhelmed by the plethora of books and movies that portray her not only as the penitent prostitute, but also as Jesus’s secret lover, an apostle greater than John or Peter, and the poster child of gnostic literature. Yet of the thirteen times the New Testament mentions…
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The Five Not-So-Scandalous Women in Jesus’s Genealogy
The Gospels include two genealogies of Jesus (Luke 3:23–38 and Matthew 1:1–17). Luke’s version traces our Lord back to Adam, placing him over the family of mankind. Matthew’s list establishes Jesus as heir to the Davidic dynasty. But another key difference between the two is that Matthew’s list, unlike most such lists in the first century, includes five women. Why? Sadly, if we do a quick Google search on the females in Jesus’s genealogy, we find that many, if not most, people conclude, “To show what great sinners God incorporated into the family tree.” We see words such as “scandalous” and “immoral” that point to the past sex lives of…
