Facing Reality is Hard

Now Dinah, the daughter Leah had borne to Jacob, went out to visit the women of the land.  When Shechem son of Hamor the Hivite, the ruler of that area, saw her, he took her and raped her. - Genesis 34:1-2

The bible does not hide from painful realities. Sexual assault, rape, and incest are not out of bounds... and that's just in the book of Genesis (earlier Lot has children by his daughters in Gen 19:36, and later in this chapter, Dinah's sister get revenge by abducting the women of the villager who raped their sister). These are awful, brutal, disturbing realities.

It may be helpful to think of bible stories like this one not of the story of how we should act, but of how we do act. This is not how things are supposed to be - it's how they are. And, unfortunately, it's an accurate mirror of our world today where 1 in 4 girls are victims of sexual assault by the time they turn 18 years old. 

There are many ways to react to this story and to the realities that the bible mirrors in our world. What does it mean to you that God allowed this story to show up in his book? Ponder that for a while today and talk with God about it.