I’d been reading a book by Henri Nouwen and challenged to think about care—what it means, how I do it, how to do it well. Nouwen writes in Out of Solitude, “The basic meaning of care is ‘to grieve, to experience sorrow, to cry out with’… we tend to look at it as the strong toward the weak, of the powerful toward the powerless… in fact, we feel quite uncomfortable with an invitation to enter into someone’s pain…”

Recently, I wrapped up a four week study of the Book of Ruth with Dive Collective and my heart is expanded. I’m going to share some of that freshness here. These are the juicy fruits I plucked from this book, startled silly by their potency and relevance to my own life. Here’s hoping there may be something here for you too.

When Naomi loses everyone and everything important to her, what she wants more than anything is to go back to her people—more importantly, her God. She returns, not because she thinks her life will get better; she goes back fully believing she will be desolate until the end of her days. But she goes back because she knows that ultimately in her emptiness, God will be enough. She is so certain that she’s willing to bear a treacherous journey back to Israel on her own. She has nothing left to lose; all she wants is God. 

It seems the world is burning. God silenced the world through Covid-19. He insisted we all take a break for a bit. And then the ground began to shake. Locust swarms and dust clouds from Africa, famines, racial tensions peaking and spreading across the globe, and it feels like our nation is irreparably fractured and our world collapsing. 

For me, whenever major life events take place, I can always trace a supernatural draw to Scripture occurring for a long season before the crises; so I know it’s no mistake that I am immersed in the Word of God more than I’ve ever been before. In fact, I have found it to be consistent with God’s rhythm in my life. 

We wrap up our first Dive Studies tomorrow and I’ll be completely honest, it was far more wonderful than I could have ever hoped or imagined.

To learn beside so many incredible people, to be challenged to see the words in a different way, to see lightbulbs go off and eyes light up as the Holy Spirit blew His breath and ignited new flames holds meaning and joy which words will forever fail to convey. I sit at my kitchen table replaying some of my favorite memories and one stands out because it occurred on the very first day as we opened our Bibles and began chapter one.

Not long into our first meeting, shortly after reading through chapter one aloud, one of our members, Michelle, said, “Just taking a step back and looking at the big picture of this chapter, I can easily see why you chose this book to start studying as Dive Collective.” And she was right. We chose Galatians with great purpose. God showed her from the beginning of the book that the most important message, the undergirding of every reading we will ever do and the lens through which we will read the entire text is the grace of the Gospel.