Emotionally Challenging Summer Read

I am reading a book called Half the Sky.  It is really opening my eyes to social injustice for women around the world.  It is making me cry out to God, please come back today.  He must cry when He sees how evil people can be.  Then I look at my girls and wonder what they will be seeing as they get older.  I am praying for them, for their future spouses, for the world they will be living in...unless Jesus comes back first...which is what I am really hoping for.

This book is written by a husband/wife couple who are Pulitzer Prize winners in journalism.  I am not sure what their beliefs are, but they are for humanitarian causes and care about social justice issues.  You would not find this book in a christian bookstore (at least I couldn't).   God is definitely teaching me and humbling me.

I can only stomach bits at a time of this book.  It has caused me to look at what God may want us to do as a family, as a woman, but mainly as the hands and feet of Christ.  I have had to struggle through a few chapters and the last one was tough.  I am not even finished reading this book yet either.

Chapter 5:  The Shame of "Honor".  They quote Deuteronomy 22:13-21.  "If a man takes a wife and, after lying with her, dislikes her and slanders her and gives her a bad name, saying, "I married this woman, but when I approached her, I did not find proof of her virginity," then the girl's father and mother...shall display the cloth[that the couple slept on] before the elders of the town...If, however, the charge is true and no proof of the girl's virginity can be found, she shall be brought to the door of her father's house and there the men of her town shall stone her to death."             

I had a big problem with this.  I feel like they are saying that cultures are believing the Bible and God condone the killing of a girl if she doesn't bleed on her wedding night.  They do say that "this view has dissipated in most of the world, but survives in the Middle East..."

I tossed this in my head all night.  Then I was doing my Ray Vander Laan study this morning, starting off in the Old Testament.  Honestly, I was thinking how cruel people could perceive God and do.  But then we went to Jesus in the New Testament.  This part was not part of my study this morning, but God had it for me.  John 8:1-11.  The pharisees brought in a women caught in adultery and they brought up the Law of Moses and wanted to stone her.  Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger and they kept questioning him, he stood up and said "If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her."  Then he stooped down and wrote on the ground.
{{  What could he have written?? Perhaps something they would have understood--( Jeremiah 17:13 ...those who turn away from you will be written in the dust because they have forsaken the Lord...)  }}
 They left one at a time, the older ones first, (Rabbinic order) until only Jesus was left with the woman.  Jesus straightened up and asked her, "Woman, where are they?  Has no one condemned you?", "No one, sir, "she said.  "Then neither do I condemn you,"  Jesus declared.  "Go now and leave your life of sin."

Wow.  I just love Jesus.  If the Middle Eastern people just knew Jesus...if they could see His mercy and love and forgiveness and fresh starts, then maybe, just maybe we wouldn't see all of this tragedy  (that the media does a fine job of not reporting.)

I love, love, love that He met me where I was this morning.