Comparatively speaking, I haven’t heard too many sermons from the Song of Solomon in my lifetime. And of those few, I can’t ever remember hearing one about chapter 5, verse 7: the violent assault of a woman who is simply looking for the man she loves…

It’s something we (in the church) don’t usually talk about, something we rarely know how to understand or name or deal with. But it is one of the deepest cancers of the Fall, one of the hardest wounds to heal.

In fact, I would argue that there is no greater pain, loss, or shame for a woman than some sort of grief or trauma to her womb or her womanhood. And I would argue that level of suffering cannot be fully understood by another woman unless she has somehow known it herself.

(I am not ignoring the men who have also suffered deeply in similar traumas, nor the good men who have valiantly loved, or tried to love, women who carried such loads of grief and hidden scars. For the sake of today’s meditation I am simply focusing on two women in the Scriptures.)

…And yet, just a few verses later, the woman knows where that man she loves is, and as she runs to him, she declares her delight in the firm knowledge of her true identity – she belongs to her beloved and he belongs to her.

(Why did I never notice until yesterday that the only difference between the affectionate title beloved and the verb phrase be loved is space?)

Going ahead about 900 years, we find a sweet young girl held in her mother’s arms while that mother sings these words of the ancient song in a soulful, earthy tone. And the girl drifts off to peaceful sleep, dreaming that one day she will be loved the way her father loves her mother.

We move forward again, perhaps thirty years, to the next chapter, later captured in Luke’s gospel. We don’t know what has transpired in between, but now we see the girl-turned-woman who has been bleeding continually – and by extension continually swimming in shame – for 12 years.

She is exhausted physically from lack of iron, exhausted financially from no lack of dead-end-medical fees, and exhausted emotionally from trying to hold on to the dream that the suffering can end and she can somehow be renewed.

That’s when she sees the Man she loves. And though contact with the very edge of His garment striking the final remnants of her faith is all it takes to immediately stop the bleeding – and begin the untwisting of her broken identity – He does not stop there. He has to identify her, call her forward in the huge crowd, and publically declare who she is to Him.

He does not call her “person.”

He does not call her “woman.”

He calls her “daughter.”

And He tells her to go in peace.

Any act of God is said to be a miracle. And in our human thinking, some miracles seem bigger or more impressive than others.

What is the bigger miracle in these two stories…and perhaps the biggest miracle, apart from basic salvation, that can come upon a woman bruised from within?

It is the reopening of her soul to really know as deep as her scars run – and even deeper still – that she is loved. And when she knows it, that she can delight in it.