Every other month we have the sweet privilege of serving some remarkably brave moms at Exodus Ministries in Dallas. These are women who were convicted of non-violent crimes, incarcerated and lost their children along the way. Through this yearlong program, they are reunited with their children, learn how to parent and do life in a new way. We typically eat a meal together, share life’s stories and do a Bible study. This time however, we skipped dinner and went straight for dessert! It was homemade pies, coffee and the story of Rahab.

While reading her story in Joshua, Rahab was labeled “the prostitute” in the very first verse. We talked about how being a prostitute might have made her feel and words like shame, abuse, outcast, and unworthy were used. We then talked about our own pasts and the regrettable things we had done, those very same words were used to describe how our past sins made us feel.

Don’t you and I all too often get stuck wearing the labels from of our past? We are forever marked by something we did- a bad decision, a wrong choice or series of decisions and choices we wish we could erase. Maybe labeled by someone else or self-labeled, we ultimately deem ourselves unusable for anything of worth.

I love Rahab’s story because her past did not define her. She went on to do much more than what her profession declared her to be in verse one, in fact her story continued for twenty -three more verses.

Sitting around that table last Friday, we were a group of vastly different women all with different labels once given to us. We too declared that our pasts do not define us. Our pasts are part of the story that is still being written by a God who is far more creative than we could ever imagine, and when we trust Him with the pen for our lives, there are still many verses yet to be written.

For His Glory!

Lynde Griggs