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She didn’t think much of herself because nobody else ever
did. She was a woman. Intrinsically inferior, intrinsically worth-less. So, she resigned herself to a place of
insignificance on the social value scale, remaining invisible to most. As she
grew up, the perception of her worth became tied to her marital status and her
ability to produce a child. When she became a wife and bore a son, she finally validated
her existence, justified the space she occupied with her thin body on this
dusty planet. Earned the right to breathe its air.
Then, there was a famine in the land. The severe drought emptied
the barn and the cellar and the pantry. The bank account and the stocks. When they
thought that things couldn’t get worse, they got worse. The day she
buried her husband, clutching her boy’s hand until it hurt, she heard the
barely-concealed whispers exchanged behind her back.
In the black-and-white moral universe of her
contemporaries the simple scales of justice are always perfectly balanced on
this side of heaven. The innocent don’t suffer and the guilty
never go free. And the measure of human suffering is in direct proportion to the
sin of the person who suffers. The greater the suffering indicates the presence
of a greater the sin, now being avenged by a revengeful God, dishing out justice from the cup of His wrath.
But, one day a strange encounter took place. The man of God made a ridiculous, impossible request and suddenly something stirred deep inside her... something that has fallen asleep on the day she was born and never awakened... until today.
Why me... why did he come to me ... a foreigner? Why didn't he go to his own people? Ask for a handout from a wealthy Jewish businessman rather than from a starving single mom?
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