Bucket Full of Grace

Scripture's boldest celebration of covenant love — and a picture of something even greater. Song of Solomon is Scripture's only book devoted entirely to romantic love... a poem celebrating desire, longing, and covenant faithfulness between husband and wife, and ultimately pointing beyond itself to Christ's love for His church. Of all sixty-six books in the Bible, none has caused quite as much interpretive nervousness as Song of Solomon. It is eight chapters of unfiltered romantic poetry: a bride and groom praising each other's beauty, aching with longing, delighting in one another's presence without a single reference to God's name, without a moral lesson stated outright, without a narrative arc beyond two lovers finding, losing, and finding each other again. Early rabbis debated whether it belonged in the canon at all; Christian interpreters for centuries were so uncomfortable with its plain content that they read it almost exclusively as coded allegory, unwill...

Eunice is one of Scripture's most overlooked figures — a Jewish mother in a spiritually divided home who passed sincere faith to her son Timothy against considerable odds. Her story is a quiet rebuke to every believer who has wondered whether their faithfulness in small places actually matters. Two Verses, One Life, Immeasurable Influence Some figures in Scripture are given chapters. Others are given books. Eunice is given two verses and one direct mention of her name, and yet the ripple effect of her life reaches into every church that has ever been planted, every elder who has ever been ordained, every believer who has ever been encouraged by the pastoral letters of Paul. She is named once, in 2 Timothy 1:5, in a sentence Paul writes from a Roman prison to the young man he called his true child in the faith. The other reference — Acts 16:1 — identifies Timothy's mother only as "a Jewish woman who was a believer." That is the full textual record of Eunice's life....