Arms of Love (47 page)

Prayer
: Dear Lord, help me to understand the past as practice for a new now and a growing future. Take my past inabilities and transform them for Your glory so that I might see how I progress each day in You.

Day Four: Pleading with the Lord about the Past

Author’s Insight
: When Dale is leaving, Adam tells him that he has prayed and pleaded with the Lord about the past but he’s basically gotten nothing back in response. He’s still trapped, still wounded, still chained. Dale says something interesting—that Adam does not pray “aright.” I deliberately did not have Adam reject this revelation because he so earnestly wants to be free, but without Dale’s insight, he doesn’t recognize the link between his relationship with his father and the past. Some might ask, “But why does the responsibility for the past sin fall on Adam? Why is he the victim?” And maybe on a deeper level, “Why are there victims of the past, Lord? Why am I one of them?”

Novel Question: How might this story have ended very differently if Adam had not found the courage to pray about the past with his father in mind?

Whom do you truthfully feel like you have to pray for or about in regard to your past? How difficult is this?

How is this difficulty lessened when we remember that we are “in Him” or comforted and held by God?

Are you angry at God about the past?

Prayer
: In You, oh Lord, all things are possible. Help me to surrender the times that I feel like a victim of someone or some situation of the past. Help me to admit to You when I am angry with You about the past and to know that You understand. Transform the wounds of my past into a dynamic future for You.

Day Five: The Past Is His

Author’s Insight
: On the previous day’s study, I touched a bit on the reality of being angry at God for the past. It is not easy to get past that anger and He knows this, but it is possible. I know because I’ve had to do it—to move from railing and crying to walking in companionship with God through trials. My hope is that the reader will take away a sense that Adam’s past belongs to God. I wrote it so the past is not even primarily Adam’s to own, though he battles this concept. In our lives, God holds our past, present, and eternity in His loving arms. What we perceive as bad, difficult, or unfair at the moment might have longlasting and overarching effects for good in our lives.

Novel Question: How does God’s ownership of the past reveal itself through Ruth’s story?

Whom do you believe your past belongs to? Is it difficult to believe that the past belongs to God?

What steps can you learn from Ruth in choosing the truth that God wants to take control of your past for a better today?

Prayer
: Dear God, even Christ had to choose to make decisions about what belonged to You and to acknowledge this truth before others while He walked the earth. Help me to learn from your Word how to go about making these similar choices in my own life and to accept that my past belongs to You.

Week Two—God Is for You

“For, behold, I am for you, and I will turn to you, and you will be cultivated and sown.” (Ezekiel 36:9
NASB
)

Day One: Take a Closer Look

Author’s Insight
: “For, behold . . .” I chose this scripture as the key one of the novel for a number of reasons—one of which is its command to “look . . . look closer.” The “for” also can mean “Because of what came before,” so it might read “Because of what came before, look closer . . .” We have trouble with looking closer at situations that disturb or bother us, and consequently, we have difficulty looking closer at the heart of the Living God. We forget that it is He who allows everything to happen to us and for a reason. It is because we are hurt, angry, or do not understand that we do not behold, or it is because we cannot look closer without the recollection of intense pain, like those who struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder. Both Adam and Joseph are tormented by the pain of the past, pain that they try to look closer at but cannot. They each must wait on God’s timing. And for each of us, there is a time when God commands, “For, behold . . .”

Novel Question: What are some issues that Lena refuses to look closer at or to behold? How do these issues affect her decisions?

Search your heart. What is it that God is asking you to behold right now in your life that you are resisting?

What do you fear will happen if you do behold this issue or event?