...Rapidly the situation changed and the next two weeks were a tumultuous time of unknown and my hope became elusive. Sometimes elusive hope is just a sign that our emotions have not quite had a chance to catch up with what we know to be true....
... but I couldn’t embrace the goodness of God or believe His love for me in my heart. The lie that God doesn’t love me was silently keeping me prisoner. God’s love hadn’t looked over the years how I expected it to, and this failed unspoken expectation had opened a door for me to believe a lie about God’s very character. ...
If my lifespan is a house then I am quite convinced I am “stuck” in one of the hallways.
I can look back onto seasons of my life as rooms in this house of my life. I had the room of being a daughter, a student, a teacher. Each season it was not as if I had changed who I was, but merely that I had entered a new room. Some I have loved more then others, some have been entirely unexpected and some have been filled to the brim with grief....
The sound of chalk scribbling on a chalkboard filters through the room. Images of sun, arrows, small mud huts and groups of people fill the board. Thirteen women sit in the small, hot classroom studying Bibles written in five different languages. More than eight tribes are represented and all Bibles lay opened to the book of Ephesians.
Each woman carefully reads or listens to the words of the passage in her own language, dissecting the ideas and questions in her mind. Using Arabic as our bridge language, together we transform written truths into images on the board, a curriculum brimming with hope, ready to be taken into homes and translated into the heart language of each woman’s village….
