My Journey of Faith
A journey of faith is a deeply personal experience. As I wrote WOMAN MEETS JESUS, I felt like I received a personal invitation from the women Jesus encountered during his three-and-a- half year ministry. They invited me to enter into the journeys they were on and meet a healing Jesus.
The journey of faith each of these women was on revealed to me the promises of God as Jesus lived and demonstrated them. Through encouragement and an ever-present grace, Jesus showed me what encouragement and empowerment of women looks like. This was a refreshing and beautiful experience for me.
WOMAN MEETS JESUS is a book on New Testament women and is hardly an innovative idea. Women of the Bible have been written about for years. In studies of the Bible and in Christian devotionals, these women’s stories have been included and their virtues extolled.
What makes this book unique is that these women allowed me to enter into their worlds. I tell their stories from their point of view. They became Christian sisters to me because, as with all sisters, our stories are intertwined. I found myself gratefully standing next to the Samaritan woman at the well, admiring her honesty. I walked beside Mary Magdalene and was humbled by the strength of her character even though all she had to go on was seven demons as her tutors. Two sisters, Salome and Mary the mother of Jesus, helped me understand how releasing my children allows them to flourish. A woman with a “reputation” broke an alabaster bottle of perfume and taught me the art of lavish thankfulness.
They didn’t work at being thankful, and honest, and free. They responded with grateful hearts. And when they responded to Jesus’ love, they formed some kind of unofficial community of women of faith – emotionally healed and spiritually healthy. And without even knowing it, used the gifts of the Spirit given to them to live significant lives in the Kingdom of God.
And so, my own journey of faith flourished as I released theses stories from the pages of my Bible and embraced them as my own. Their stories connected to my story when I was honest enough to dig a little deeper. They prompted me to live a more examined life with surprising stops and detours along the way. Out of this experience came my book WOMAN MEETS JESUS.
Ruth Vander Zee -- Woman Meets Jesus: Part Two >> | Journey of Faith |
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