There’s a particular kind of loneliness that only happens in a crowded room. Everyone else seems to know the words. Everyone else seems to have the tidy history. And you’re standing there carrying something you’d rather nobody found out about.
Rahab knew that feeling from the inside.
She lived in Jericho, in a house built into the city wall - which tells you something in itself. Not at the centre of the city. In the wall. Scripture doesn’t tidy up her job or her reputation, and neither should we. She is, by every measure of her day, the last person anyone would pick.
Then two spies arrive, and she hides them. She asks for one thing in return: when this city falls, remember me and my family.
What follows is one of the quietest sentences in the Old Testament. After Jericho comes down, we’re told that Joshua spared Rahab and her relatives, and that she lived among the Israelites.
Among.
Not near them. Not tolerated at the edge of the camp, useful but never quite family. Among them. Plenty of people would have settled for saving her life and called it generous. God went further and gave her a place. There is a real difference between being helped and being welcomed, and heaven has always aimed at the second.
And the story keeps going. Turn to the first page of Matthew’s gospel and there she is again - mother of Boaz, great-great-grandmother to King David, in the family line of Jesus. The woman with the worst reputation in Jericho ends up in the family tree of the saviour.
God doesn’t simply forgive our past. He weaves it in.
Charlotte Elliott understood this. Writing in 1835, out of her own sense of being useless and unwell, she gave us words about coming to God just as we are - not once we’re sorted, not when we’re respectable. That’s the door Rahab walked through. It’s still open.
So here’s the step. Stop editing yourself before you come to God. Two minutes in the car or the kitchen, and say the truest thing you can. Not the tidy version. The real one. He already knows, and he hasn’t moved away.
And if you’ve been walking with God a long while, your step is different. Think of one person who arrived with a messy history - a new face at the corps, a neighbour people whisper about, a colleague everyone has quietly filed away. Treat them like family rather than as a project. Learn their name. Make room at the table.
That word among has to be lived by somebody. Usually it’s us.
Watch today’s five-minute devotional here:
Who first made you feel like you belonged? I’d love to hear about them.