Arms of Love (46 page)

T
he following is a four-week Bible study on the novel you have just read. It can be done alone or with a reading/Bible study group. The goal of the study is to enrich your reading experience with biblical application to your everyday life.

Week One—The Past

Then Moses said to the Lord, “Please, Lord, I have never been eloquent, neither recently nor in time past, nor since You have spoken to Your servant; for I am slow of speech and slow of tongue.” (Exodus 4:10–11
NASB
)

Day One: Does the Past Hold You?

Author’s Insight
: The creation of the characters of Adam and Joseph Wyse is a study of the way in which the past can grab hold of the present and future and taint them with troublesome memories, disturbing sins, or unspoken but ever-present omissions of truth. The past can hold you and restrain you from having the abundant life that God desires for you. For us, time is linear—we cannot travel backward and fix things—but time is not linear for God. He can own your past, reshape it, and use it for good in your life today. If you’ve watched one of those “value of antiques” TV shows, you may have seen this scenario: A man comes in with a cabinet from the 1700s, but he tells the appraiser with pride that he “redid” the piece: buffed out the scratches, repainted it, and so on. The appraiser shakes his head sadly and tells him that had he not redone the cabinet, it would have been worth a hundred times as much! The past is like your old cabinet, your old self—God wants it with an appraiser’s eye, with all the dents and flaws. He alone can redo your past, and He waits to do so.

Novel Question: Can you identify with Adam in any of his struggles with the past? List these points from the novel.

Next, consider how the concept of surrendering the past to God might alter or does alter Adam’s words at these points. How would the scenes play out differently with more love and truth in dealing with the past?

Who or what situations in your own life do you avoid because confronting them would mean facing the past?

Prayer
: Dear Lord, please bring to mind the people I need to forgive through You for the past. Let me list them or their initials here. Search my heart and reveal situations in my life that would benefit from letting go of the past’s hold on me.

Day Two: Past Failures

Author’s Insight
: I know from my own battles with the past that those times and situations can sometimes produce nightmares, so it was not difficult to write Adam’s struggles with his dreams. He also refers to times he’s tried to pray and has been met with darkness. He feels like he’s a failure in his faith at times. Samuel even blames him and holds him accountable for a past he cannot consciously recall. Adam is a perfect example of how we can use acceptance, God’s acceptance, to encompass the things we count as past failures in our lives—the “I should haves” or “I wish now that I wouldn’t haves.” We don’t know how God can work out those past issues to shape us more like His Son, to bring us greater strength, and to teach us to live out our deeper resources of love and compassion.

Novel Question: How does Lena’s regret over not finding a midwife to help her mother make her feel?

Circle the life areas in which you feel a sense of past failure.

Next, list three specifics of the areas circled above that you wish to pray about to release these past perceptions of failure.

Prayer
: Help me, dear Lord, with these areas (times or people) where I believe that I have failed or that someone has failed me. Help me to see a new and greater purpose in these experiences as I allow You to work through them in my life.

Day Three: Neither Now, nor in Times Past

Author’s Insight
:
I could not do it then, so I cannot do it now
. Whatever your “it” of failed attempts is, you can know that you’re not alone. We all judge the present and future by past attempts. Adam and Lena might have continued to gauge their relationship on past attempts and found themselves without any future together at all. But I wanted to write that conflict, that struggle over things not working before, to show that God can turn any situation around. I mean that—
any
. There is no mess, no sin, no brokenness too great for the cross. Christ’s sacrifice would have been made if yours was the only human life He would save from eternal judgment. He would have died for you alone; He died for you alone. The evil of the world would have you believe that who you were in the past, what you were capable of, is all that you will ever be. God says that “He is doing a new thing.” Try again and rest in that assurance, and then keep trying. You will find that the past fades in the light of faith.

Novel Question: How does Adam persist in his love for Lena despite past failures?

What could you not do in the past that you can do or face now?

What do you want to accomplish or believe now that past experiences would tell you that you will not be able to do?