Behold, the kindness and severity of God.

Those words from the Book of Romans seem to stand in stark opposition to one another.

How can someone be remarkably kind and remarkably severe at the same time?

That is a good question for anyone exploring God.

And the apparent opposition of those two traits is something any reader of the Bible

finds compellingly dismantled again and again. This is a story about a God who does not choose sides, but is a side, the only side you want to be on,

whatever the conflict, and whatever your paltry reasons for a particular allegiance.

It's a story about the severity and kindness of God

and about one person who found herself changed forever by that complexity.

I'm Justin Gerhard.

Welcome to Holy Ghost Stories.

Thank you. The

The They're talking in the streets.

Everyone is.

At first it was hushed rumors passed from cellar to cellar in the marketplace,

fueled weekly

with the arrival of traveling merchants with fresh stories on their lips.

But then, as the stories corroborated one another, they seemed less like rumors.

Then came the refugees.

All of them arriving in Jericho, trembling, glad to find security behind its massive walls,

all of them with a story to tell.

The same story in the end, the story of a people without a home, a wandering people, a

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