Reading Songs of Songs will always be very special to me. I love that it reads like a script for a play. The take away is deeply personal. The Shulamite woman is us (the world), the bride. The lover boy king ins God. It starts off with us in anguish, lamenting about being bruised and neglected and longing to be loved, to be seen. The verse that says “don’t awaken love before it’s time” was so profound cuz it gives a backstory of what happened to get her into the state of pain she was in. She talks to her friends and they try to console but it’s not enough. With a heavy heart full of longing for her lover, she goes home and then He comes. But she hesitated. It speaks to seeking God with all your heart, a posture she hadn’t yet come to, so when she eventually opens the door, He’s gone. She’s desperate and roams the streets in the night looking for Him. The watchmen rough her up but she persists… and then she finds Him. The rest of the story narrates a beautiful love story of both parties swooning over each other and then a marriage and celebration. Solomon, almost like his father David (when he wrote Psalm 22-24) must have been prophetic with this book. We could see the guilt in the way Proverbs had gone so far and this looked like God telling him there was a way back to Him, that the love wasn’t dead. The “Jesus as the bridegroom and us as the bride” imagery is very strong in this book and it’s so beautiful. I really love SOS.