from Uprooted:
Planted: Expelled
A big part of being a human being meant being able to look into another person's eyes and communicate, Mara thought. Human beings got to sit around a table, eating and telling stories, catching the irony of another person's raised eyebrow or droll smile. Human beings stood in the marketplace, going nose to nose with one another, haggling as if this handful of spices or that cup of oil could change the course of history. And being human meant being able to give and receive an embrace.
It had been nearly a generation—eighteen years—since Mara had last thought of herself as a human being. "You're different. You're worthless," the toxic honeyed voice that no one else could hear had told her over and over and over again. She could barely remember what life was like without those words forming an endless background loop in her head. Even after she'd surrendered to that voice, believing it, it tormented her like a jackhammer. "...Different... worthless..." pounded into her soul, her body folding in on itself to trap the words deep inside of her. The names others called her, "Cripple," "Untouchable," confirmed what the other voice had said about her all along.
She lived in a corner of a shed with the animals of a well-to-do family. Mara was their "project", their "good deed", their "insurance policy". They gave her shelter and allowed her to share the scraps they fed their animals. They told her that they believed that their continuing benevolence to her would help their accounting with the Almighty.
She begged at the edge of the marketplace during the week, using the few coins she collected to buy herself a handful of stale bread. That bread was her sustenance when she got to the trough before she got a chance to join them. She spent her Sabbath days sitting at the rear of the women's section in the synagogue, listening. The beautiful words and prayers and songs made her wish... something. Mara grasped for words to name the wish, but the honey voice silenced her by telling her that those words weren't meant for the likes of her.
She heard the Teacher holding forth in the synagogue that day, Jesus' words muffled by the incessant hum that seemed to suffocate her hearing. She didn't even hear Him call her out of the crowd by name, like He already knew her.
The others around her pushed and pulled her toward Him.
He leaned in so Mara could see His eyes, an act of spiritual violence, then placed His hands of fire on her shoulders and said, "Woman, you are set free from your infirmity..." There was a nanosecond when she felt His words exploding inside of her, expelling that other voice and its lies. She rose, her arms unfurling like the branches of a sheltering tree, upstretched to heaven. Praise to God flooded from her in response to the one word that had replaced the others.
Free.
Other Samples
Parablelife: Living the stories Jesus told in real time (FaithWalk). Click to order.
Sample chapter 1 from Parablelife.
"Hearing eyes, seeing ears: adventures in traveling without a map"
