standing with the five

{via PerceptiveArtista}

two years ago, a soul-sister reached through the letterbox and pressed a book into my hands. the title spoke a name so often spoken with accusing acid within the church :: Havah {Eve}. 

i got lost inside that book. it wove a familiar story into a new pattern and wrapped itself around my shoulders as i wept. it's always the way when you're reading something well-known, where you know the ending like the back of your hand, but somehow, you think if you beg a little louder, things will change. 

:: but they never do. 

she's one of those women that gets a lot of grief from those of us who have carried their stories in our pockets from the early Sunday School days. we point 21st century fingers back with 20/20 vision and wag them back and forth with clucking tongues. tsk tsk tsk. she should have known better. 

all we see is the bite-mark, the belly curved with her father-in-law's unborn twins, the rooftop bathtub. and so we toss our heads and murmur, we can learn from them. we must not do what they have done. i would have never...and we find our paths crossing with modern day women just like us, just like them, and we cross to the other side of the road. 

but we leave the biggest part out :: the mother of He. 

nothing they did erased the lineage of the Lion from their blood. nothing they did made them untouchable or unworthy in the eyes of the One who would one day touch the hand of the broken, bleeding, unclean ones and whisper daughter. 

{via PerceptiveArtista}

you will hear thunder and remember me, and think: she wanted storms. 

the rim of the sky will be the colour of hard crimson. 

and your heart, as it was then, will be on fire. 

:: Anna Akhmatova

a wise friend of mine spoke to my heart this week :: how can we love the ones we avoid? and it made me gasp aloud. i see so much of me reflected back from the eyes of these scarlet-lettered ones. but He tugged and tugged at the sewn-on letter and let it unravel, wild and loose, and tied a scarlet thread into their hair so that the world can see their eyes. 

there is so much existence in Him. i've said it before, and i'll say it here again because i cannot remove this reality from my heart. He is not a statue of marble, rigid and cold. He is breath and blood and Light and Wild. He is touchable-sacred. 

i'm finding my place at His feet, curled up against His warm side. there's me, and there's the five women from His line with their woven stories wrapped around their shoulders. and there's you, too. 

i am telling my Story. 

right beside theirs.