Scandal broke out in Washington D.C. in 2003 when The Washington Post exposed Valerie Plame Wilson as a covert operative on weapons of mass destruction. The political uproar that ensued over this damaging leak of classified information was clearly warranted.
What the story broke for me was my stereotyped ideas of government spies. Anyone on the look-out for the manly, James Bond-type of secret agent would be completely fooled by this attractive blond forty-year-old wife and mother who for twenty years worked as an undercover agent on one of the CIA’s most dangerous missions.
All of the intrigue, intelligence, and danger you might find in the stories Valerie Plame could tell, are present in the stories of women in the Bible who were often called upon to move out of their comfort zone and take unexpected risks to address injustice, undermine evil plots, and advance the kingdom of God on earth. And, like many covert operatives, they acted courageously while unaware of the vital piece their actions in the immediate setting contributed to the achievement of the master plan.
Queen Esther is an obvious example. Under the ominous threat of genocide, even Mordecai acknowledged young Esther had been divinely stationed “for such a time as this.” After months of advising his cousin covertly from outside the palace walls, he could now do nothing but await Esther’s instructions. The crisis jarred her out of focusing on maintaining her personal safety to risk her life for a bigger cause. The Jewish nation counted on her to piece together palace intelligence she had gathered from her privileged insider position as King Xerxes’ queen. Ultimately, she maneuvered masterfully through palace politics to overthrow the enemy’s plot.
Less obvious is the story of Ruth the Moabitess. No one I know thinks of Ruth as a covert operative, but that is just the point. Unlike Esther, whose story took place in the highly visible arena of world power, Ruth operated under the radar in the margins of society. When adversity drove Naomi’s family into Moab, who imagined she’d return bringing with her a key kingdom operative on whom so much would depend? Who would suspect a young non-Jewish female immigrant of carrying out so vital a kingdom mission as the one God entrusted to Ruth?
Ruth’s movements were confined to the realm of ordinary family concerns, making it easy to miss the fact that global matters were at stake in her activities. She was putting food on the table, caring for her grieving mother-in-law, marrying, giving birth, and later (along with Naomi) raising a little boy. It wasn’t The Washington Post that blew Ruth’s cover, but the biblical narrator of her story who announces at the very end that the family she battled to save is the royal line of King David which, turns out, is the promised line of Jesus. Although Ruth never knew it, without a doubt, the whole world was counting on her actions.
The strategy God implemented at creation—to advance his kingdom through the efforts of his male and female image bearers—rose to new heights when Jesus mobilized all of his followers to disperse throughout the earth with the gospel. A secular journalist, analyzing different religious movements, remarked,
“It is an explosive concept, with the potential for unleashing creative Christian energy in many areas of endeavor—ordinary lay-women and men, indistinguishable from their colleagues and neighbors, going about their normal occupations, who nevertheless “catch fire” with the gospel and change the world.”
Most of us don’t live our lives on the dramatic scale of a Valerie Plame, an Esther, or a Ruth. But their stories are important reminders that more is always going on than meets the eye. As image bearers, ezers, and as Christians, we are part of a cause that is greater than our individual lives. God strategically stations His ezers where there is kingdom work to do. That alone lifts our everyday lives—our words, our actions, our relationships—to a higher level of significance.
The stories of Esther and Ruth also raise questions about notions that God prefers to do important kingdom work through men, that passivity and dependency are acceptable qualities in anyone who follows Jesus, or that He only occasionally calls on women to do important kingdom work if and when the men are absent or falling down on the job.
Both Esther and Ruth had to dig down deep and summon up levels of courage, wisdom, and strength they never knew they had in order to do the work God was calling them to do. No one would rescue them. They needed to rescue others.
Neither woman operated in a vacuum of godly male leadership. To the contrary, they collaborated with two of the strongest male leaders in the entire Old Testament—Mordecai and Boaz. Both men were blessed and grew stronger because of the heroic initiatives of the women.
It’s wonderful to imagine what might happen if each of us took our lives this seriously. How would it change things if instead of leaning on others, we viewed ourselves as covert kingdom operatives? If we actively embraced our responsibility to live out the gospel, to advocate for others, battle for justice and mercy, and advance the kingdom one square inch of earth and one life at a time?
When my cell phone rings and someone I care about is on the line wondering if I'm doing anything and if I want to “hang out” for a while, it just might be an opportunity for a covert operation.
This past April my family gathered in Oregon to celebrate my parents’ 65th wedding anniversary. While we were together, my brothers and I produced a list of statistics from 65 years of marriage that sound a little like stanzas from The Twelve Days of Christmas—4 kids, 8 grandkids, 9 great-grandkids, 12 moves, 4 pastorates, 5 dogs, 1 cat, 3 goldfish, countless hamsters, and a parakeet (but no pear tree as I recall).
None of these statistics surprised us. But what did surprise me at least was to see on paper the fact that of their 65 years together only 33 were with kids at home (and that’s almost certainly well above the average). For 32 years and counting it has just been the two of them.
If we include the years from the day my mother was born until she married my dad, she’s been on active duty as a mom for less than half of her life. What is more, 10 years ago debilitating pain took my mother out of the traditional role of a wife she so beautifully fulfilled for most of her adult life and sent my dad to the kitchen. Here's another statistic to ponder: 9 out of 10 wives end up spending some portion of their lives alone, a staggering number that doesn't include women who never marry.
Looking at the numbers and the real lives they represent, shouldn’t we be asking some pretty penetrating questions about God’s calling for women?
For example, do the answers we embrace fully address the many changing seasons and circumstances of our lives? Is it possible for some women to finish the job God created them to do long before their lives are over or, even worse, to miss entirely God’s main purpose for creating them? Are we putting little girls and young women on hold until they marry and have children? Is it possible that at any moment some unexpected tragedy or misstep can downshift our lives from significant and purposeful, to marginal and no longer vital? Are God’s purposes for women that fragile? Was an older divorced friend of mine right when she murmured dismally, “I had my chance”?
If my mother’s story didn’t raise questions for me, the women I’ve encountered during the past five months would have done the job. In the first few months of this year, my path has crossed with those of gifted women in ministry and in seminary. I met courageous women at Fort Bliss, in El Paso, Texas—wives of U.S. servicemen who are single-handedly managing the home front in an atmosphere of daily uncertainty, as they track and support husbands stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan. There were others—a group of remarkable business women in Orlando who are making a difference for the kingdom in the corporate world; Hispanic women in South Florida who have emigrated to this country and are coping with seismic alterations as they try to restart their lives; even an online community of several hundred heartbroken but faith-filled women battling for the souls of children who have turned prodigal.
Anyone attempting to define a common demographic among these various groups of Christian women would have to give up in frustration after checking off “female.” The demographics don’t line up. Neither do their circumstances. Their lives are not all the same. And in this broken world, change is an ever present reality, if not an outright threat as it certainly is for the women of Fort Bliss. If a woman’s highest calling is to be a wife and mother, as we in Christian circles so often assert, then a lot of us are having to settle for something less, often through no choice of our own. And even for women like my mother who marry and raise children, large chunks of their lives fall outside the scope of God’s calling for women. Can it be possible that in planning for us God failed to take into account the myriad of contingencies we inevitably encounter?
All of this leads me to look again at the strong military Hebrew word ezer (pronounced āzer)—the label God gave His daughters when He created the first woman. Is ezer a part-time job for women that we take up for a season and lay down when the nest empties or if we land among the high percentage of women who end up on their own? Or do marriage and motherhood come under a much larger umbrella of God’s purposes for us that encompass the whole of every woman’s life and drench every day of our lives with kingdom purpose?
If ezer is this all-encompassing, then my mother is still deployed and has been since her birth. She is still a warrior on active duty, still fully engaged in advancing God’s kingdom right where He has stationed her. My divorced friend hasn’t run out of chances either. And my new friends at Fort Bliss were speaking for all of us when they said, “Our calling as ezer-warriors for God’s purposes is exactly what we need to march us forward through our lives.”
By the time May arrives, if you're anything like me, you're ready for a break. This spring seems to have been busier than ever, but this is actually a good thing. Looking back, I am both amazed and energized by all that has happened. God has blessed in so many incredible ways. Here is just a sampling:
Synergy2008 is the history books now. Thanks to all of you who attended and all who prayed. The weekend was incredible. Women gathered in Orlando from all over the United States, Canada and overseas. Many churches, ministry organizations and seminaries were represented.
This was the first year Gifted For Leadership co-sponsored the Synergy conference with the Synergy Women's Network. We are thrilled to have them on our team!
Here's what one woman (who came from China just for the weekend) wrote:
I was overwhelmed by the outpouring of God’s kindnesses and encouragements to me throughout the weekend! The whole conference felt deeply rooted in both heart connections to pursue the Lord and strong biblical/theological foundations to fuel such a fire. The writing track in particular was extremely helpful towards practical tips and excellent resources. I left feeling empowered and energized to pursue this gift!
We are already working on next year's conference. Mark your calendar so you won't miss it: Friday-Sunday, March 6-8, 2009. More details will be coming soon!
Here's a surprising piece of news: Barely two months after its release, The Gospel of Ruth is already in a second printing!
If you haven't had a chance to read it yet, you might want to add it to your summer reading list.
A friend of mine knows exactly how to create the perfect Christmas for her family. Visiting her home in December is like stepping into a Hallmark card or one of Budweiser’s “I’ll be home for Christmas” commercials—the ones with the Clydesdales pulling the sleigh through the snow that used to make me cry the first time I celebrated Christmas away from home.
Those Martha Stewart touches we all admire, that are embedded in our best Christmas memories (or fantasies), are a long way away from the raw courage and gritty determination that characterized women’s early contributions to Christmas. In the midst of all the hustle and bustle of Christmas, it’s easy to forget the heroic young ezers who risked everything to make that first Christmas possible.
Mary of Nazareth comes immediately to mind—the young teenager who sacrificed her girlhood dreams to join a cause that cast a dark shadow over her reputation and ultimately broke her heart. We’ve lost sight of the fact that there were two courageous young mothers and two miracles babies born in Bethlehem. Without both babies, there would be no Christmas.
Ruth the Moabitess doesn’t show up on Christmas cards, but she belongs there just the same.
Although separated by multiple generations, Ruth’s and Mary’s stories run on parallel tracks. Both were unmarried when they sensed God’s call on their lives. Both traveled great distances under stressful conditions to reach Bethlehem. Both made radical choices and costly sacrifices. Both had miracle pregnancies and gave birth to significant sons in Bethlehem. Both women heard and responded to a voice that gave them every reason to fear. But faith not fear drove their actions which ultimately blessed the world.
There are important differences too. Mary was betrothed—to Joseph, a man of extraordinary character. Her dreams were intact and her future secure (at least before the angel appeared). But any dreams Ruth may have had as a young girl had already gone up in smoke by the time she was in her mid twenties. She was certifiably barren—a disastrous label and an unspeakable sorrow in a culture where women were valued by their ability to bear sons—and then she was widowed.
Who would imagine God singling out a woman like Ruth to play a crucial role in His redemptive purposes for the world? But that’s exactly what He did.
The voice Ruth heard was not the angel’s proclaiming “Emmanuel”—God with us, but her bereft mother-in-law Naomi lamenting Yahweh’s departure. “The LORD’s hand has gone out against me!” Yet just as clearly as Mary heard the angel's voice, Ruth heard God's call at that dark moment.
What fascinates me about Ruth’s story is the fact that she moved forward without the benefit of the heavenly perspective that Mary enjoyed. Ruth saw her life from ground level the same way we see ours. From that earth-bound vantage point, her life didn’t look anything like a Hallmark card. Once in Bethlehem, she joined the ranks of gleaners—reduced to scavenge for a living.
But just like Mary, Ruth said “Yes” to Yahweh. She embraced the battles God placed in her path and determined to do whatever it took to put food on the table and to rescue Naomi’s family from the awful fate of extinction.
In the end, both young women gave birth to sons in Bethlehem. Mary laid her baby in a manger. Ruth laid her baby in Naomi’s empty arms.
Of course, Ruth didn’t know she was getting ready for Christmas. She had no clue that God’s purposes for the world were hanging on the courageous choices she was making or that the family line she was fighting to save would one day produce the promised Messiah. From her ground-level point of view, Ruth was only putting one foot in front of the other to take care of Naomi.
And Mary would certainly need someone to explain to her that all the jingle bells, last minute shopping, and hoopla we go through each December are connected to the miserable ordeal she endured when she gave birth to Jesus in a make-shift maternity ward with Joseph as her midwife.
In a strange way, as Christmas approaches, the way these two women prepared for Christmas is a gift to me. Neither of them ever saw a heart-warming beer commercial, a Hallmark card or a Christmas tree. Christmas for them meant saying “yes to God. Meant costly choices. Meant moving out of their comfort zone to fight a battle and take up a cause that humanly speaking was impossible.
Most years, I believe I can manufacture the perfect Christmas for my family. This year, I know up front I won’t be able to pull it off. There’s too much loss and heartache in my family at the moment to convince anyone that life can be perfect—even on Christmas Day.
Perhaps instead of striving to produce the kind of Christmas that is unrecognizable to its originators, I’d be better served by bringing their Christmas into mine—a Christmas that admits I need a Savior to rescue me. That centers on saying “yes” to God’s calling on my life and to the battles He is calling me to fight. That looks at life from ground level, sees the messiness, the confusion, the impossibilities and yet believes that what is happening here is part of the bigger story He is weaving.
Theology runs in my family. I think it’s in our DNA. Recently my two seminarian nephews attended an academic conference on the Dead Sea Scrolls. Simultaneously, over a thousand miles away on a California freeway, the same subject captured the imagination of my niece’s four-year-old son. (See, I told you it’s in our DNA.)
Riding along in the car with his mother, he heard something on the radio about Dead Sea Scrolls and began jabbering excitedly about what he referred to as “the Dead Sea squirrels.” According to his version of the story, people who believed in God went into some caves and found a bunch of squirrels. They wrote Bible verses on pieces of paper and tied them to the tails of the squirrels. To his four-year-old mind, Dead Sea squirrels make great evangelists.
I didn’t encounter “scrolls” or “squirrels” as I wrote The Gospel of Ruth. But I faced the same potential for confusion in two important words—one I was eager to study and a second I tended to avoid. I never imagined how these words would intertwine or how their combination would shake up my whole vocabulary.
The Hebrew word “hesed” is a beautiful word that appears three times in the Book of Ruth. In a very real sense, this word drives the action and holds the key to unlock the gospel-rich message of the story. All three leading characters—Ruth, Naomi and Boaz—are hesed-givers.
“Submission” doesn’t show up at all in the Hebrew text of Ruth. But traditional interpretations portray Ruth as deferential and passive and have attached this label so stubbornly to her that she has become something of an icon of the submissive woman.
Both words gave me a lot of trouble. Then I realized that conventional definitions of these terms drain them of meaning and are as wide of the mark as “squirrels” are from “scrolls.”
No English word exists that adequately expresses a hesed kind of love. Bible translators offer us a smorgasbord of choices: loving-kindness, loyal love, kindness, mercy, or just plain love. But none of these words—either alone or combined—come close to capturing the rich potency of hesed.
Submission carries all sorts of negative connotations for many women. It often implies subservience and has become a handy tool for breaking unpleasant marital deadlocks. In a world where violence and oppression against women are rampant, it’s a very tricky business to counsel women to yield to the will of men. Everyone is concerned about the abuses, and scholars go to great lengths to apply this clear biblical command in healthy and positive ways.
An added difficulty for me was the fact that, although Ruth obviously respects both Naomi and Boaz, she stubbornly resists Naomi’s directives to return to Moab, and Ruth’s shocking proposals to Boaz break all the rules of properly submissive feminine conduct. Instead of a demure, deferential woman, Ruth is strong, gutsy, and courageous, and consistently takes the initiative with Boaz. Her behavior doesn’t line up with what I’ve always been taught about submission.
What helped me to deepen my understanding of these important words—hesed and submission—was to throw out Webster’s Dictionary and consult instead the dictionary according to Jesus. Under Jesus’ tutelage common everyday words like “neighbor,” “mother and brothers,” “lust,” “meekness,” and “prayer” take on richer meaning and mushroom in scope. Our human dictionary tends to narrow, downsize, and even trivialize the meaning of biblical words. Our understanding seems embarrassingly puny next to Jesus’ robust definitions. Jesus stretches us and takes us to a radical counter-cultural way of relating to others.
Hesed and submission are not soft words. They are attributes of Jesus that every one of his followers—female or male—is called to emulate. Neither hesed nor submission are about “giving in” to the whims and wishes of others. Both are all about “giving out” from the completeness we have in Jesus and our passion for His kingdom. Ruth, Naomi and Boaz embody both of these words as they freely make thoughtful, determined, costly sacrifices for each other. Together they cause the light of the gospel to shine brightly from the pages of the Old Testament.
Jesus calls us to live dramatically different lives than the rest of the world. Not “kinder and gentler.” Radically different. We’ll be talking “squirrels” instead of “scrolls” unless we let Him define His own terms.
The cover of Time Magazine’s September 3, 2007 issue features the familiar lined face and penetrating gaze of Mother Teresa, a.k.a. the “Saint of the Gutter” for her sacrificial and tireless efforts on behalf of Calcutta’s hungry, poor and dying.
To millions she embodies closeness to God. Even today her name serves as a synonym for saintliness. Yet a decade after her death (and against her wishes) Mother Teresa is back in the headlines. This time, instead of being duly honored for her life's work, she's suffering the kind of invasion of privacy most feared by people in the public eye.
Turns out Mother Teresa had something to hide.
A collection of private letters she addressed to her spiritual guides has surfaced, disclosing the fact that behind her saintly public persona Mother Teresa was a tortured soul for the last half century of her life. Contrary to the world’s perceptions of her, she wrestled with deep doubts of God and was tormented by long-term spiritual dryness.
“When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven,” she writes with unveiled honesty, “there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives and hurt my very soul.—I am told God loves me—and yet the reality of darkness and coldness and emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul.”
Although these revelations are shocking and will alter the public’s perceptions of her, I find it hard to imagine Mother Teresa sailing through life on a spiritual high when she daily faced an ocean of misery and was fighting a losing battle against poverty and human suffering.
Oddly enough, Teresa’s despair reminds me of Naomi, a woman whose story I’ve been pouring over for months. I can easily imagine Naomi writing the words like those found in Teresa’s letters. After watching her whole world swept away without a flicker of interference from God, despite her desperate cries for help, Naomi felt the darkness of soul Teresa describes. “The LORD’s hand has gone out against me,” Naomi lamented. “I went away full, but the LORD has brought me back empty. . . The LORD has afflicted me; the Almighty has brought misfortune upon me" (Ruth 1:13, 21).
Some might feel inclined to criticize Mother Teresa, after all, it seems difficult to reconcile her pious image with the soul-starved wasteland she lived in for so many years. Historically, we’ve been very hard on Naomi—calling her a bitter, complaining old woman, without investing much effort in attempts to comprehend what it was like to walk in her sandals. Yet in recent years Naomi’s image has undergone something of a transformation, and she has emerged with greater credibility as a female Job. The parallels between the two sufferers are striking and this fact alone revolutionizes our understanding of the book of Ruth.
Reading about Mother Teresa’s confessions in Time and contemplating Naomi’s story (which has been in the public domain for centuries) made me think seriously about finding a better place to stash my journals. But at another level, I find these unsettling disclosures about both women strangely reassuring.
At a minimum, they dispel all notions of the super-spiritual believer. If the stories of these two women don’t do the job, there are plenty of others who have similar tales to tell. Abraham, Sarah, Hannah, David, Job, Habakkuk, Jeremiah, C.S. Lewis, Joni Eareckson Tada—all struggled to make sense of God, His silences, and the evil in this world. If we take their words seriously, the evidence seems pretty compelling that God’s children don’t have all the answers, but may well be the ones who are asking the hardest questions.
In the aftermath of my brother-in-law Kelly’s death and the ongoing wait for the recovery of the bodies of his two climbing partners, writing my new book, The Gospel of Ruth, would have been completely unbearable for me if Naomi had dusted herself off and moved on with head held high and a victorious smile on her face as she endured unimaginable personal devastation. Instead, I found this female Job to be good company as I wept and began wading through my own doubts and confusion over what had happened. Her brutal honesty invites my honesty, moves me towards God, and opens a path to growth.
We may, like Mother Teresa, put on a brave face before others. But behind closed doors we all struggle to trust God. We all wrestle with discouragement and doubt, while at the same time struggling to put one foot in front of the other and inch forward in obedience to God. This is the path of faith, not of unbelief.
But the disturbing revelations about Teresa and Naomi also bring awareness to me that the dry, empty, dark stretches I experience are an important part of my journey with God. God does His deepest work in me when I am troubled, hurting and confused. At these low points He is my focus and I know beyond a doubt that I desperately need him.
What is more, the struggles of these two women give me hope that God can and will work through me to advance His Kingdom, even when I’m spiritually depleted and He seems so distant to me. It is a marvel of God’s grace and power that the doubting, faltering Mother Teresa found the stamina and courage to persevere in ministry against hopeless odds. Her humble ministry of mercy ultimately caught the attention (and earned the respect) of the entire world and inspired others to follow her example.
It makes me smile to think that Naomi, in her darkest hour, was God’s chosen evangelist to reel Ruth into the Kingdom, and that He was recruiting the broken-down Naomi for a strategic mission to fortify the spiritual backbone of the royal line of Jesus. The darkness that engulfs the soul of God’s child doesn’t limit and may even be vital to what He will do through us. According to Paul, God’s power shines brightest in us when we are at our weakest (2 Corinthians 12:9).
I still may bury (or destroy) my journals. But in the meantime, I am comforted to know that those painful and despairing entries I have written (and those I will yet write on the blank pages in my journal) are not signs of spiritual failure or God’s abandonment, but indications that He is here and He is at work.
"Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you" —Hebrews 13:5
It has been a long time since I was in a math class. But the other day, while listening to Garrison Keiller’s Writer’s Almanac on NPR, I was suddenly back in the classroom.
He was reading Jessica Goodfellow’s poem entitled “The Invention of Fractions.” I stopped what I was doing to listen.
In his smooth baritone voice, Keillor began,
God created the whole numbers: the first born, the seventh seal
I was about to get a thought-provoking lesson in Higher Math.
The reading continued . . .
Ten Commandments etched in stone, the Twelve Tribes of Israel — Ten we've already lost — forty days and forty nights, Saul's thousand and David’s ten thousand. ‘Be of one heart and one mind’ — the whole numbers, the counting numbers
It took humankind to need less than this; to invent fractions, percentages, decimals. Only humankind could need the concepts of splintering and dividing, of things lost or broken, of settling for the part instead of the whole.
Only humankind could find the whole numbers, infinite as they are, to be wanting; though given a limitless supply, we still had no way to measure what we keep in our many-chambered hearts.
It’s been almost three months to the day since Search and Rescue volunteers found my husband’s brother Kelly’s body in the snow cave on Mt. Hood. I know a lot of you were praying, and both Frank and I are grateful for your prayers and notes of support.
As you can imagine, the grief and disappointment for my family are still raw. And I’m still processing everything that happened—from the upsetting midnight phone call telling us Kelly, Brian and Nikko were in trouble to the awful day the search effort was downshifted from “rescue” to “recovery.”
I’m still intrigued by how the story captivated and inspired the nation. We thought this was a private family crisis. Yet countless people watched and wept and prayed and cared deeply about the fate of our three guys right along with us. It’s difficult to explain such a phenomenon.
I can’t help thinking that at least one reason people were drawn to the story may have been because (if for only a brief moment in time) we were witnessing the kind of whole-number living Goodfellow writes about. The kind of unity God intended for the human race from the beginning.
With three men in trouble, scores of people voluntarily banded together as one, solidly united behind the mission of bringing the climbers back alive. It didn’t seem to matter that they didn’t know Kelly, Brian, or Nikko. It didn’t matter that many were strangers to each other or that there were countless differences among them. Somehow none of that got in their way. They dropped what they were doing, strapped on their gear, and headed for the mountain, ready to do whatever they could to find and rescue the three lost men.
The first mathematical equation in the Bible gives us a hint of the kind of whole-number world God envisioned from the beginning. When he created the first man and woman and gave them a monumental mission, he said—the two “will become one flesh.” It’s a higher form of math that doesn’t easily compute in our world. Not only do we have trouble pulling it off in our relationships, even modern technology resists it. No calculator or computer—no matter how sophisticated or how many times you try—will ever tell you one plus one equals one.
Jesus takes the equation even further. According to His calculations, it doesn’t matter how many “ones” you add together, the final sum will always be one. This is His heart for us. And no matter how solidly united SAR volunteers were on Mt. Hood, Jesus means for His followers to surpass them in whole-number living.
Jesus final prayer for us—His dying wish—was “that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. . . . May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me” (John 17:21, 23).
I don’t know about you, but I’m thinking I still have a lot to learn about math.
Scandal broke out in Washington D.C. in 2003 when The Washington Post exposed Valerie Plame Wilson as a covert operative on weapons of mass destruction. The political uproar that ensued over this damaging leak of classified information was clearly warranted.
A friend of mine knows exactly how to create the perfect Christmas for her family. Visiting her home in December is like stepping into a Hallmark card or one of Budweiser’s “I’ll be home for Christmas” commercials—the ones with the Clydesdales pulling the sleigh through the snow that used to make me cry the first time I celebrated Christmas away from home. 
