Much of what we have known as “regular” life is up in the air these days. With so much isolation, many of us have been feeling the effects of a long term, pent up anxiety. We watch the news of explosive anger, violence, slander and bickering among our peers. We see more racism than reconciliation, more violence than victory, and more stress than sanity. COVID has us all guessing about what’s next and in need of some serious relief.
We need more than slogans like “stay positive” and “keep it real.” We need wisdom that has its roots deeply in the ground, we need to hear from people who’ve been through stuff like this before. We need ancient wisdom for anxious times. After all, we’re choking on information while we’re starving for wisdom.
We need to hear from someone who has the audacity to say things like this:
It’s okay that things are not fine. Carpe diem, anyway. Don’t worry about it, whatever will be will be. Find some friends to go through hard things, you can’t do it alone. While you’re busy figuring out how to buy food and pay rent, make sure you don’t let your soul starve. What was will be again, what happened will happen again.
Don’t get excited—it’s the same old story. Nobody remembers what happened yesterday. And the things that will happen tomorrow? Nobody’ll remember them either. Let go and live. (from Ecclesiastes “The Message” translation)
These are the things I’ve picked up from reading and writing songs about ancient wisdom. Before being introduced to the sages of old in seminary, I was previously unaware of Wisdom’s secrets. As I studied the Wisdom of many traditions, I began to see that beneath all the layers of do’s and don’ts that we’ve packed into our spiritual and religious traditions, there is a water table of cool, refreshing, thirst quenching wisdom. Just waiting to be discovered especially in times like these. Wisdom was made for times that feel like the end of the world. Wisdom’s got this.
“Out beyond ideas of rightdoing and wrongdoing, there is a field, I’ll meet you there.” –Rumi, 13th Century Sufi Poet
Maybe one doesn’t go looking for Wisdom, maybe it just finds you after you’ve thoroughly exhausted every other possible answer to the existential dread we all feel inside. For me, it happened a few years after that life altering experience known as divorce. I headed to seminary and was introduced to the wisdom literature of the world, including the books found in our very own Old Testament.
Wisdom is not something we really notice that much, but it’s been with us along. Calling out to us in the voices of ancient grandmothers, storytellers and poets of old. Telling us not to fret, it’s okay that things are not fine. Giving us honesty over politically motivated speech. Wisdom doesn’t dish up easy answers, but calls us to get rooted in something greater than ourselves and stop chasing the wind, for God’s sake.
Wisdom literature comes to us from many traditions, it’s timeless. It’s something that we all have in common, it’s built into us, it comes with the whole “created in the image of God” thing. But we need to cultivate it in order to experience its fruits. It can ground us in difficult times, show us how to live through anxiety and fear and even enable us to continue to bear fruit during times of drought.
It helps us to be still long enough to cultivate peace, even in the midst of unsettled issues. Wisdom teaches us how to trust God for the next right thing to be revealed.
It’s exactly what we need to get through COVID.
Rumi, a Sufi poet from the 13th century said: “perhaps you are searching among the branches for what can only be found at the roots.” I invite you to consider that this COVID chasm, this time of great change might be the one time when you can truly listen to the roots of wisdom calling.
We hear from the sages of old, reminding us that “this too shall pass.” COVID has pulled back a few layers and exposed us to our vulnerability. As we work through what that means, it’s good to take some advice from ancient wisdom, to find something at the roots of us, at the core of our collective humanity, something that connects us all.
Here are a few takeaways from Ecclesiastes, one of the Wisdom books of the Old Testament. If you’d like to explore some of the voices of ancient wisdom traditions and learn how to apply them to your every-day life, join me for an upcoming workshop “Kiss the Ground: Finding Peace in a Chaotic World” (see below) There’ll be music, laughter, some aha moments, new friends and some creative wisdom to take with you in a special gift from me. So don’t go crazy, get grounded!
From the Quester in Ecclesiastes:
Don’t Worry About It
What was will be again, what happened will happen again.
By yourself you’reunprotected. With a friend you can face the worst. Can you round up a third? A three-stranded rope isn’teasilysnapped.
Carpe Diem, Anyway!
Seize life! Eat bread with gusto, Drink wine with a robust heart. Oh yes—Godtakespleasurein your pleasure! Dress festively every morning. Don’tskimponcolorsandscarves. Relish life with the spouse you love Each and every day of your precarious life. Each day is God’sgift.It’sallyougetinexchange For the hard work of staying alive. Make the most of each one! Whatever turns up, grab it and do it. And heartily! This is your last and only chance at it.
Don’t Let Your Soul Go Hungry
We work to feed our appetites; Meanwhile our souls go hungry.
Join me for this online workshop on Aug 2nd. Just click the image above to register. Participants will experience the voices of ancient wisdom from various world traditions including poetry from Rumi, Hafiz, Ecclesiastes, and even some ancient Egyptian wisdom poetry. Learning how to let this ancient wisdom flow into our modern lives in anxious times. With registration, participants will be given a link to download music and a PDF with creative journaling prompts and highlighted wisdom poetry that will form the content for this workshop. Participants can use this material in every day lives, creating a habit of visiting ancient wisdom and becoming rooted in that which is greater than ourselves.
Sherry received a grant from the Louisville Institute to study Wisdom traditions from around the world and channel them into modern songs. She created “Kiss the Ground,” a beautiful CD full of wisdom from the sages of old. These songs, curated from Wisdom traditions in Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Egyptian and Native American spirituality act as guides through difficult topics. The workshop will cover the topics of the sages including: loneliness, finding purpose in a meaningless world, love, death, and entering into a dialogue with creation.
It feels apocalyptic right now. A worldwide pandemic, a potential break-down in food distribution systems, cataclysmic weather patterns, violence, economic struggles, and now something no one expected, killer hornets! It’s enough to make us go crazy. That is, if we didn’t already have a story to guide us through. A story that tells us there is not only a way in the wilderness, but the wilderness is the way.
“Stories hold the world together,” as storyteller Michael Meade has said. There’s a wonderful story hidden in the Bible that can help us find our way through these chaotic and uncertain times, a story of the woman clothed with the sun with the moon at her feet. She wears a crown on her head of twelve stars and she represents the people of God, the goodness of creation itself. We come across her in chapter twelve in one of the books most of us have spent our lives avoiding, Revelation. She appears on the scene just as a war is breaking out in heaven, giving birth to something new while fighting off evil in the form of the world’s most powerful dragon. He was so powerful, in fact, that he had seven heads and he swept a third of the stars from heaven with his tail.
Just as she gives birth to a son who is to be a great leader for the nations, the dragon tries to devour her baby. But God saves him, and gives her the wings of an eagle to fly off into the wilderness to be nourished there, for a time and times and half a time, as the story goes. This is when the dragon gets really angry and declares war on the world. But the woman watches from the wilderness, where she is strengthened and nurtured by God. While God and all God’s angels fight the war in heaven, eventually defeating the dragon forever, the death of evil .
She is nourished in the wilderness, and so are we. This motif is in many stories in the Bible. The way is made clear, not in the heat of battle, but in the forced retreat to the wilderness. None of us go there willingly, or so the story goes. Hagar is banished to the wilderness and finds the way, led by God. The Israelites escape to the wilderness and find a whole new future. Jesus is forced into the wilderness by the Spirit and finds the strength to carry out his mission there. We are tested in the wilderness, but it is also the place we are taken to be nourished, nurtured and learn to depend on a power greater than ourselves. It’s the place where we let go and learn to trust in God who shows us that there is not only a way in the wilderness, but the wilderness is the Way.
The Wilderness is the Way.
It feels like we are all on a very long wilderness journey, thanks to COVID19. The days are long without much direction, we are anxious about how our needs will be met and often wondering what to do next. We need a story to guide us, to hold us together, to tell us who we are, to ground us in something bigger than the evidence of the day. The woman clothed with the sun steps into this dark book of revelation and into the darkness of our world, and reveals something new. This something new can be a navigation point for all of us as we try to figure out what to do with each day’s chaos. God is doing a new thing, even and especially in the wilderness, in the uncertainty of our days, in the chaos of our world.
We may feel like we are at the end of a story, but the woman clothed with the sun shows us it just may be a new beginning. This feeling that we are doomed and that chaos is the only thing that rules the day is actually a trick the seven headed dragon, and the chaos monsters of our world, play upon us. The darkness of chaos is always trying to convince us that the world is full of doom and gloom and that our best days are behind us. But the woman clothed with the sun tells us, “don’t fall for it.” Resist and wait, resist and pray. God will surely come and give you rest, nurture and a way forward. Giving you the uplift of eagle’s wings just when you need it the most.
The seven headed dragon would have you believe that chaos is in control, it exists to create the chaos of uncertainty in the world. But it also feeds off of our lack of faith, our fear. Revelation tells us that God wins the war in heaven and it’s the death of evil, forever. It’s a scenario that plays out a million times a day, all over the world. Though the dragon takes its bite, love always wins. Love is the most powerful force in the universe.
This story shows us that God walks through the dark hills of our lives, too, lifting us up when we have no more strength to fight. Saving the evidence we have created out of goodness. God gives us rest and nurture, even in the middle of the fight. God not only makes a way in the wilderness, the wilderness becomes the way itself. To new life, new creation and the experience of God’s love invading the world.
Trust that God will meet you when you face the chaos monsters of your days, and give you what you need to find rest, renewal and peace. God will even fight the battle for you, when you are ready to let go.
Check out more hidden stories of women of the Bible in this free resource, click here to download the free PDF
There are little sprouts coming up in my garden from seeds I planted a couple of weeks ago. It’s kind of a miracle. Since I planted these seeds, my garden has experienced torrential downpours, a tornado and even frost. These sprouts shouldn’t be appearing, and yet new life is bursting into view. The seed has abided in the very substance of it’s being, the ground, and together, they are forming something new – nourishment.
The word abide comes to mind as I watch these tiny miracles spring from creation itself. To abide means to continue without fading or being lost. To take refuge and root in that which is greater than ourselves. In so many spiritual traditions, this is the core concept. abiding in the Creator, in God, in the Great Spirit. Jesus speaks of abiding in God as God abides in us. There is a oneness at the core of this abiding, a merging with that which gives life that allows us to “continue without fading or being lost.” A Power greater than ourselves meets us in the darkness of our world and nourishes us, turning us into something new, giving us the strength to nourish others.
To turn towards the practice of abiding is to turn towards something greater than the winds that toss us about or the events of our lives that threaten to lead us down pathways of despair. We need this nourishment each day of abiding, it is the very thing that keeps us spiritually alive. It is the path of life, our very refuge.
It can be difficult to practice the very thing we need the most when all around us seems chaotic and driven by fear. But remembering to abide can be a practice that not only saves us in these times but changes us on the other side. Taking some moments throughout the day to develop this practice can provide a rootedness that can carry us through our lives and through difficult times. In fact, these thin spaces of our lives, when the veil between heaven and earth is cracked open through suffering, can be the perfect time to begin or perhaps begin again.
Here is one of the practices I use to abide. Feel free to adapt it or develop your own.
Centering Prayer: This is a practice that has been used by monastics for hundreds of years, but Fr. Thomas Keating really brought this practice into the mainstream. There are many videos of him discussing it on Youtube and you can readily find them by doing a search with his name + “centering prayer.” Sometimes, I listen to them while driving. He is the real pro and I recommend learning the art of the practice from his videos. Being a musician, I like to innovate a little. I adapted my version of this practice several years ago. You can use a word or a phrase that helps you feel connected to God. I often use the word, “Creator” but it can be a word such as “love” or “grace” or “peace.” The important thing to remember is that anyone can do centering prayer, it is available to us all. Sit in a comfortable position, breathe deeply for a few minutes, slowly. As you breath in you say the word at the tip of the inhale of your breath, say it in your mind. Then breathe out slowly. Repeat this for 10 to 20 minutes (or however long) as you seek to connect with God. If your mind drifts off, just gently get back into the practice. It may take a few minutes for the mind to settle. When I have trouble settling my mind (often), I add a little soundtrack of Tibetan prayer bells, which again can easily be found on Youtube. The bells help my mind to sink into the breath. Somehow, the vibrations of the bells are very calming.
Maybe you are like so many people and may have problems with the God concept. So many people have been raised to believe that God is wrathful and punishing or indifferent and uncaring. But God is unconditional love itself. Something that is hard for us to fathom. If you have trouble with the concept of God, try this acronym: G.O.D. – Good, Orderly Direction. God desires to move us to a place of sanity in a world that sometimes feels like it is overwhelmed with insanity (Einstein’s definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results).
We need new practices to solve old problems, to confound old narratives of hurt and pain. Or maybe taking old practices and making them new. Centering prayer, as Thomas Keating has said, is a form of “Divine Therapy,” that over time, quiets the mind and helps us connect to the heart. In other words, to abide, to continue without fading or being lost.
As we return to God throughout the day in prayer, we discover a miracle. God abides in us, giving us strength, growing our internal resources, giving us hope even in times of uncertainty.
Here’s a little piece of a song I love, created with Rumi’s poetry and a wonderful composer, Conni Ellisor. It’s called “Kiss the Ground” and the lyrics really remind me of the importance of being grounded in that Power that is greater than myself. Enjoy!
In a post 9/11 era and the age of the global pandemic, we are waking up to the new reality of collective trauma. It’s not something most of us want to discuss over coffee, in fact, we’d really rather avoid any unpleasant conversation about trauma in general. Yet, here we are, trying to get centered in a time that feels as if “the center cannot hold.” (W.B Yeats) The truth is, we can find a center that holds, that is, if we learn to cultivate it. But first, we need to understand why its so difficult to find. Our feelings give us clues.
Living in a culture of collective trauma often feels like we may have lost access to a loving, hopeful or joyful self, the very center of our being. It seems the evidence around us points only to the tragic loss of safety or sanity. And that is the core issue, that we are trying to gain a sense of peace, sanity and stability from outside of ourselves, trying to construct a center from things that simply cannot hold.
When we find ourselves in the grip of fear and trauma, we begin grasping for solutions. Where we may have once lived in a world that seemed to provide a measure of stability, we find that our usual framework may have lost its ability to sustain us anymore. Though it may seem easier to reach outside of ourselves for solutions, the key to healing the wounds of collective trauma is to go within, but that is easier said than done.
Trauma affects us in many different ways, but one of the main coping mechanisms that can hinder our healing is hypervigilance. It is a state of being constantly on watch, born from the expectation that something horrible is about to happen. In hypervigilance, one constantly feels the need to control and manage one’s environment. Most of us experience it as anxiety, some as anger, but it is also there in addictions to media devices and the constant news feeds of the ongoing tragedies of the world. Our hypervigilance gets confirmed over and over again by our news feeds through the evidence of terrible events unfolding all over the world. Add to that the violence occurring in one’s own life or community and a hypervigilant state then becomes justified. We are caught in an unending loop of needing to monitor and control an environment that seems to be spinning out of control. We can easily become trapped in hypervigilance and this can keep us from taking the healing journey within. Hypervigilance can also keep us in a state of fatigue and exhaustion. Because it’s exhausting to constantly be on watch.
Collective trauma also generates the feeling that the world, events and our lives are moving very fast and it is difficult to slow down. Media seems to play a prominent role in maintaining a hypervigilant state, though it can also provide opportunities for healing when its used wisely.
What we all too often fail to experience in our culture is any true acknowledgment and would be healing from the deep psychological wounds of trauma. But how do we even approach these wounds that seem to overwhelm us at every turn? The pain seems so much greater than the solution. In addition, the places that once seemed to keep peace and order seem to be less available. Churches are closing at an alarming rate, massive expanses of wilderness are being co-opted for natural resource development, the places that once brought peace seem to be bordering on extinction.
When Jesus, the great healer, walked among us, he shared the radical notion that the kingdom of God, the place where the healing happens, is within. Jesus left us a pathway, the Spirit or Holy Spirit, as a guide to this realm within. Whether you think of it as a kingdom or a realm or a dimension, it’s the same thing, he told us that we must go within if we are to discover our authentic soul life awaiting us, that part of us that is eternal, indestructible, connected to God, connected to love. The Christ Spirit is a companion to walk with us on this journey. The Great Healer walks among us still.
If we continue to seek out what is hidden in our hearts, the image of God within us all, we will begin to catch some initial glimpses of the possibility of healing. But we cannot do it alone, we need others to walk with us. Somehow, this inward journey is easier to do in a supportive community.
Stabilizing Community
As we take the risk of an inner journey, we need communities that provide stability for us to experience moving from a trauma driven way of functioning in the world, to a love infused way of being. To risk healing requires nurture from others. There are communities out there that can become places of healing for us if we seek them out. Even now, as we are learning to connect virtually, Zoom meetings are popping up everywhere. Churches are forming virtual small groups, 12 step programs are forming regular Zoom meetings, group therapies are going online now and so much more. You will find that if you ask God for direction, to supply your need to connect to community, you will find connection. Sometimes we just need to take the first step and ask for what we need.
Just as collective trauma is contagious, so is collective healing. Our journey inward to sit with pain, to bring it before the Divine Light and risk loving love into being is a pathway to overcoming fear in our ourselves and in our world. As we learn to cultivate the Center within ourselves, we will naturally help others to find it, too. Healing is contagious!
We are due for a collective healing and it begins in each of our hearts, each day. Claim some territory in your heart today for healing, slow down, breathe, meditate on the heart. As you do, ask God to be present and feel the wounds of fear letting go. Keep coming back to the prayer of the heart and to the community of prayer, the heart among hearts of love will surely find the way to God., the Center that holds.
P.S. Here’s a meditative song to help you on your path to finding a prayerful state within. I wrote this song after beginning to practice the first step of a 12 step program: “I am powerless over…..” Fill in the blank. Sometimes this step takes up a long portion of my prayer time! Naming all the things I’m powerless over helps me to enter into God space, where I’m letting go of control. “Surrender” is always a third option, after we’ve exhausted fighting and fleeing, we can just surrender to whatever God is trying to do in our lives and let it unfold.
“Nobody escapes being wounded, we are all wounded people. When our wounds cease to be a source of shame and become a source of healing, we have become wounded healers.” – Henri Nouwen, “The Wounded Healer”
The Wounded Healer is a human archetype that’s been around for thousands of years. In native culture, the wounded healer is the shaman or holy man/holy woman who heals themselves and others through becoming a channel for the Creator’s power to flow through them. They often use their wounds as a source of information for healing others. Jesus became the great Wounded Healer (the topic of Nouwen’s book) as his wounds became a source of healing for the wounded of the world.
It’s a beautiful idea, that our wounds could become a source of healing. But if you’re like me, you might initially balk at the thought of placing your wounds in the service of others. After all, if you’ve been on the earth very long, you soon learn from the school of hard knocks that you have to heal yourself before you can help anyone else, right? But here is what Nouwen is getting at and it’s also the real genius behind Jesus’ core teaching of “love one another.” The way to unleashing the wounded healer within isn’t in the fixing of our wounds or the wounds of others, it’s in the loving.
We so often confuse fixing and loving, and it’s easy to do.
When Jesus told his followers that the most important thing was that they love one another and love God, he knew they were broken people in a broken world. The thing is, he wasn’t telling them to fix the world or fix each other, he was telling them to love each other. It is somehow very important as we find solutions to the problems of the world like hunger, homelessness, climate change, violence and oppression that love leads the way.
Loving is different than fixing. We can’t fix each other but we can love each other, and this is where the magic happens, this is where the healing begins. In fact, Jesus was clear on this point too, that we need not get involved in trying to fix each other, but loving, loving one another is necessary for our own healing. Because it is love that connects us as human beings. People tend to suffer from loneliness, isolation and abandonment without love. Without love, we are just doomed to live out the nature of our wounds.
Healing our wounds is really important to human thriving. The field of psychology informs us that if we don’t heal our wounds, then they become the pain that we inflict on others. We project the dark attributes of our wounds onto others because we are trying to find some kind of method to cope with them. When we are not able to go through the healing process, we tend to project our pain outwardly, it’s how we manage the emotions we can’t process. Because we’re projecting the material of our wounds such as hurt, fear, mistrust, jealousy, it makes it difficult to connect with people, to love and have intimate relationships. Without healing our wounds, we are controlled by our pain.
But, as it turns out, the opposite is also true. That when we project love onto others, we go in the direction of love, in ourselves as well as outwardly. Love begins to give us messages about who we really are, because love is inside of us, the most powerful force in the universe. Love leads us to healing. We begin to crave more love as we get to know love, as we seek to love without conditions, we want more of that in our own lives. It leads us to seek our own healing. If we get into a program of healing, then our wounds can give us the information we need to move forward into friendships, love relationships, intimacy and a sane, manageable life. We become wounded healers.
Healing happens as we learn to give and receive love, as we share our brokenness with other human beings who are also broken. It took me a long time to really accept this. Because I always felt that I had to fix things, situations, problems; that in my ability to fix impossible situations, I could be spectacular and finally be worthy of love. I found out, in ten years of being the pastor at one of those churches Pope Francis has called “the frontlines of the world’s pain” that I was wrong. I couldn’t fix anyone or anything, all I could do was love broken people and eventually, learn to love myself. I learned that if I let love lead, solutions to problems would arise and I could see the way clearly.
Check out Sherry’s latest book: reflections from a pastor on homelessness and her spiritual journey.
The act of loving one another actually gives us access to our wounds. Because often, they are buried so deeply within us, we can’t reach them by ourselves. We need others to become mirrors for us so that we can locate them, have language for them. Sometimes our wounds are buried beneath layers of a false self that we’ve developed to survive because the pain of these wounds has been too overwhelming for us to process. Our real self or true self goes into hiding to survive. But the genius of Jesus’ teaching, “love one another,” is that as we risk loving instead of fixing, something deep within us begins to vibrate, God’s love, hidden inside of us all. It wakes up like a sleeping giant and begins to shake these layers of the false self as we connect with others through love. We begin to realize there is a truth inside of us that is much more powerful than our pain, that is Divine love. It shines out from inside as we risk loving, as we realize we are broken. Somehow our hearts need to break so we can believe that love is inside of us, love rescues us from within because it is innate in us all. We were all created with the image of God within, we just have a hard time believing it. Love holds us steady, loving others stabilizes us as we take the healing journey.
There is a wounded healer inside of us all. As counterintuitive as it might seem, we find our healing by putting our own wounds in the service of a greater love. God begins to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves.
As the poet Rumi said, “the wound is the place where the light enters you.”
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We always thought the role of the prophet was a “for males only” club in the Bible. That’s likely because if you’ve ever read any books on the prophets of the Bible you will often find the usual list: Moses, Aaron, Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Amos, Hosea and other men. We’ve often been told that while women were allowed to speak prophetically such as Miriam, Hannah, Mary and others, they’re not usually considered candidates for the traditional role of the prophet. But things are changing, God is always doing a new thing, even in the pages of the Bible.
Prophets were the greatest authority on God in ancient Israel, that is, if their prophecy came true. If it was untrue, then they were branded a “false” prophet, and well, their career was pretty much over. It was a risky job. Prophets had a wide array of duties in the ancient Israelite world. From interpreting Divine oracles (proclaiming God’s Word), to recruiting disciples, appointing monarchs, military leadership, singing songs, gathering the community, and much more. Their voice was central to the community, a kind of oral, spiritual navigation device before sacred words were written down to guide humanity. So, it stands to reason that if we see the Bible from the perspective of all things patriarchal, women would not be granted such an important role. But we would be wrong if we made this assumption. As scholars are discovering, there were many women prophets in the Bible, named and unnamed. Women who were not just prophetic, but full fledged prophets.1
There are some legitimate female prophets who stand out in the Bible, whose stories are not so hidden, such as the prophet, judge, and military leader, Deborah, found in Judges 4,5. There is also Huldah who is mentioned in 2 Kings 22:14-20 and 2 Chronicles 34:22-28, a prophet who taught rabbi’s and priests in matters of holy law at the temple gates. In fact, to this day, there are gates at the Temple mount known as The Huldah Gates.
In Isaiah 8:3, there is the female prophet with whom Isaiah conceived a child. There are the female prophets, plural, of Israel that Ezekiel condemns in 13:15-17. There is also Noadiah, a very powerful Israelite female prophet who opposes Nehemiah in 6:14. Other women who are identified as women who prophesy are Miriam, Hannah, Abigail, Sarah, Rachel, Esther, and Mary, the mother of Jesus. I’m sure there are still others that could be added to this list as their stories are excavated from the unexplored regions of Bible. We have so much more to learn about women’s roles in the ancient world of the Bible. But the real work lies ahead of us and belongs to the people of faith. We have much work to do to teach our young girls (and boys) about these heroic women in the Bible. The women who led armies, preached God’s prophetic words, ordered faith communities and fought the giants of the land. The question is not about whether or not female leaders existed in the Bible, rather, what do we do with their stories now that they have arrived in our world?
Learn about the female leaders of the Bible and much more in this free resource. Click this linkto download.
Rev. Sherry Cothran serves as Lead Pastor at St. Mark’s UMC, Chattanooga. She has been a senior pastor in the United Methodist Church since 2010, she is also a singer/songwriter and author. Her last project, “Tending Angels: Stories From the Frontlines of Heaven and Earth” combines a music video with a book to bring awareness to the plight of the homeless in the U.S. You can learn more about her work at www.sherrycothran.com.
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Wilda C. Gafney, Daughters of Miriam: Women Prophets in Ancient Israel (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2018 [↩]
