The Song of the Brave Mother

(from Judges 4 and 5)

Sing, now. Sing a true song.
A song about the day
God turned the whole world over
like a cup poured out.

Once there was a people who were afraid.
Nine hundred iron chariots afraid.
For twenty long years afraid.
These were the days of the judges,
when the people kept forgetting God
and crying out to him again,
round and round like the wheel that kept spinning in the story just before this one.
And the strong man Sisera, who owned those chariots,
never lost. Not once.
He was the kind of strong
that makes small people feel even smaller.

Who did God reach for then?
Not a king.
Not a captain with a sword as long as your arm.
He reached for Deborah,
a woman who sat under a palm tree
and listened, and judged, and loved her people
the way a mother loves her own.

"Go," she told the soldier Barak. "God will go ahead of you."
And Barak, shaking a little, said,
"Only if you come too."
So she came.

And then, sing this part softly:
God said the strong man would not fall by a soldier's hand at all.
He would be handed over to a woman,
to someone nobody was watching.

The battle came. The chariots came.
And God sent the rain.
The river rose. The iron wheels stuck fast in the mud,
and all that mighty strength
could do nothing now but sink.
The strongest army in the land
ran away on foot.

And Sisera, the man who never lost,
ran too.
He ran to a tent far from the fight,
and a woman named Jael gave him milk
and a place to lie down.
And there, in that small unwatched tent,
God ended the long, long war.

The strong man fell.
The lowly were lifted.
And Deborah lifted up her song:
the day God flipped the world like a cup
and poured the proud ones out.

Maybe you have felt too small for the story, little one,
like the last one picked,
like the big and the loud get all the parts that matter
and you only get to watch from the back.
That is exactly where God loves to reach.
He chooses the overlooked one.
He lifts the one nobody was watching.
He pours the mighty out
and gathers the small ones close, calling them his own.

And long after Deborah's song,
God would do the greatest upside-down thing of all.
He would send a King with no chariots,
laid in a feeding trough, riding a borrowed donkey,
who wins not by being the strongest
but by becoming the smallest of all,
so that no overlooked, last-picked, too-small child
would ever be left out of his family.
What the world calls losing,
God calls the throne.

That night Deborah's song drifted out over the hills.
And long years after that song had faded,
in those same hills there lived a man
who felt smaller than anybody,
so afraid he hid his wheat in a winepress.
God had a new name ready for him too.
Turn the page and hear it.