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                    ||                       How beautiful on the mountains
                    ||                       are the feet of those ... who
                    ||                       proclaim salvation, who say to
                                             Zion, "Your God reigns!"
          Pastor RALPH & GENE ANN WOOD                  --Isaiah 52:7 (NIV)
          E-mail:  randg.wood@encode.com
          FRESH MANNA, 19/04/1998 ........................ GENESIS 29:16-18
          {16} And Laban had two daughters. The name of the elder was Leah,
          and the name of the younger was Rachel. {17} And Leah's eyes were
          tender. But Rachel was beautiful and well favored.  {18} And
          Jacob loved Rachel. And he said, I will serve thee seven years
          for Rachel thy younger daughter.   --GENESIS 29:16-18 (ASV)
             In a computer BBS discussion forum, recently, someone wrote to
          us, "There are times when I've been told I don't fit into `God's
          plan' because I was disabled".  Well!  Maybe it's because we work
          with people who have pretty severe mental and physical handicaps;
          maybe the cowardly injustice of such a cold insult; maybe because
          this is so contrary to Scripture, so opposed to God's love, power
          and purpose-- this just made our spirit rise up and reply!
             Look at Leah!  Centuries before the invention of eyeglasses,
          or corrective surgery, or whatever was needed, she had some kind
          of weak eyes.  To be sure, the word "tender", could mean just,
          "delicate", rather than, "weak".  And Calvin allows for either
          interpretation, in his commentary: "Jacob was rather inclined to
          love Rachel; whether it was that Leah, on account of her tender
          eyes, was less beautiful, or that she was pleasing only by the
          comeliness of her eyes, while Rachel excelled her altogether in
          elegance of form".  However, the RSV, NAS, and NIV translators
          all use the word, "weak", indicating some physical handicap.
             No doubt this posed a serious problem, in an outdoor-working,
          shepherding family where even the beautiful younger sister Rachel
          herself was a shepherdess [GENESIS 29:4-6].  In the eyes of man,
          Leah maybe did not seem a good candidate to fit into God's plan.
          Indeed, even her own father only got her married off to Jacob by
          switching daughters on the day of the wedding [GENESIS 29:20-23].
          And at that, after Jacob married Rachel as well, he clearly made
          Rachel his most favoured wife of the eventual four.
             Yet God had a plan, for Leah.  God honoured Leah as the first
          wife, and gave her six sons!  This made Leah the mother of six of
          the twelve tribes of Israel!  More, this included the tribe of
          Judah; thus God chose Leah to become the ancestor of Jesus, His
          own Son, our Saviour.  And further, Leah would, I think, also be
          the ancestor of most present-day Jews.  Disabled people have no
          part in God's plan?  Well, Leah had some form of disability, and
          she certainly had a very significant part in God's plan!   --RLW
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