Redeeming Love

I read Redeeming Love in the infancy of my Christian life as a young college girl. I put it on the top on my list, and then kept it safely on my bookshelf for many, many years. It, along with With an Everlasting Love by Kay Arthur, helped shape my view of God and His everlasting love for me.

It has been 15-20 years since I’ve last read Redeeming Love. I finally took it off my shelf because I thought it would help me meditate on the love God has for me.

If you are unfamiliar with Redeeming Love, it is a Christian classic, written by Francine Rivers in the early 90’s. This book is a fictional retelling of the story of Hosea in the bible. Redeeming Love falls in the Christian romance genre. In the book of Hosea, God asks Hosea to marry Gomer, a prostitute. However, in this book, Michael Hosea senses the Lord telling him to take a woman known as “Angel” out of a brothel and marry her.

The first time I read this book, I:

• was not married or a mother yet
• loved Christian fiction, particularly romances
• was young in my faith.

On this reading, I:

• am married and a mom
• don’t love romances books much at all.
• have walked many years with the Lord.

My perspective on this novel changed a bit.

As I began the book, I immediately hated the romance feel of the language.

The prologue, which is Angel’s back story, was where the book starts. Angel is originally named Sarah. She is a little girl, around 8 or so at the beginning of the book.

I had to cast the book aside many, many times during the prologue because it was so difficult to read. Sarah is the product of an affair. Her mom and she live on the outskirts of town. Her dad comes to call occasionally, along with many other men who help pay the bills. He is a rich man with a family in town. Her sight makes him feel guilty. He despises her when he comes to call on her mother. She overhears him tell her mom that he still wishes she had been aborted. She tucks this into her little heart and through other events, begins to believe that even her mom does not want her.

Eventually, she and her mom no longer have a home to live in.  They move to the docks, where her mom is forced to prostitute herself so that they have food to eat. Her mom gets sick and dies, leaving Sarah alone with her mom’s boyfriend, Rab. Rab is a clueless drunk who tries to find her a respectable family to live with. Unknown to him, he takes her to be adopted to a very wealthy man who owns an upper class brothel and has a taste for little girls. Just as she is enslaved, Duke kills Rab in front of her, and so begins her life as a prostitute.

At the end of the prologue, I was wondering what in the world had ever kept me reading. I realized that I was super naive upon my reading when I was younger. I was unable to grasp what was really happening to the same depth I am now. Now, I have children, and more aware of the world and sexual crimes.

As the meat of the book starts, Michael Hosea takes Angel out of a brothel and marries her. She runs away at least three times. Michael loves the Lord. Angel doesn’t know the Lord. The last time she runs away, God whispers to Michael for him not to go after her. A beautiful story of salvation and grace wraps up the book. Ultimately, this is a story of how the Lord woos Angel to Himself using His people.

Initially, I was turned off by the book, but ultimately, I too was wooed by the Lord. I understood Angel and her running from God. The book convicted me of the love within my own marriage. Angel was easy to identify with. Sometimes, I have prostituted myself (no, not as a prostitute) and made other gods come before the one True God. Sometimes, I don’t allow myself to be loved by the Lord or by the world. I still listen to the enemy’s lies. I run and hide. But ultimately, I want to be healed as Angel was, love like Michael does, and be transformed into a more perfect image of the glory of God because of His limitless love.

So while I understand the message better, and thus found myself not wanting to read the depths of the darkness, it was a beautiful story that gave me pause in my own Christian walk. I thought about all the ways God has moved me to Himself in the course of the last 15-20 years and all the stories I could tell. Also, I thought about how I am still journeying to be as close to Him as is described in this book. Reading it moved me closer to God. I hope to reread it again when I need to remember and grasp how deeply I am loved by God.