Shadowing Practice: When Family Falls Apart - Learn English Speaking with Video

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Don't you think it's miraculous that you can turn struggle into some kind of wisdom for yourself?

That you can actually find love after you've been really hurt?

That you can rebuild after something precious has been stolen?

Ruth's prologue is tough right now, but it is going to tip us toward a brighter world.

So, how many of you, if we turn this place into a bit of a Bible trivia pub night,

could knock out the beats of the book of Ruth?

Show of hands.

You think you could do it?

Some of you could?

That's okay.

There's no shame here.

Honestly, until a few weeks ago, big parts of the story were kind of foggy to me, even me.

I'm a professional at reading the scriptures, so sometimes I also need reminders.

So the book of Ruth is the story of a family broken down by famine and then built back up by foreigners.

So here's some bonus trivia for you as well.

Ruth is one of the shortest books in the Bible, but it actually comprises one of the longest stories in the Bible.

Ruth is one of only two books named after a woman.

You better believe I was going to point that out.

Bonus points for the fact that

Ruth is the only book named after a non -Israelite woman.

And Ruth is a very, very important matriarch as far as the biblical story goes.

Does anyone know to whom?

She's the great -great -grandmother of?

I mean we can kind of trace everybody here right but King David so keep that in mind.

Today we will take our time to settle into the story

of Ruth by biting off just the first five verses

and after today we really haul so we're going to talk about prologue,

estrangement, what you're left with, and hope anyway.

Verse 1 opens pretty generically, but it tells us everything.

In the days when the judges ruled, there was a famine in the land.

So a man from Bethlehem in Judah, together with his wife and two sons, went to live for a while in the country of Moab.

So the first thing we're told is that this story is embedded in the time of the Judges, where the Jewish scripture places

Ruth after the writings, linking it to this virtuous woman in Proverbs 31.

The Christian canon does, in fact, place Ruth after the book of Judges.

For context, my favorite book about Judges in my personal library is called Gift of the Grotesque.

So that does tell you something about Judges, that while there were brief periods of peace and stability in Judges,

it is mostly a book of horror and chaos.

We're told over and over again that the Israelites did evil in the sight of the Lord, and they suffered those consequences.

And then along comes Ruth.

Ruth does, in fact, begin with some horror.

There is starvation, there's displacement, and spoiler alert, up front here, there is a lot of death.

But Ruth will quickly become a story where, in fact, there are no bad guys, just people doing their very best.

So we are going to find a story full of kindness and generosity and even this Mr. Rogers,

like, won't you be my kinsman redeemer warmth to the people and the way that they treat one another.

But let's get to the hard parts first and then get them out of the way.

So here's what happens.

Again, in this opening line, we get the broadest sweep of the story.

A certain man, though not yet named, from Bethlehem, which means breadbasket,

goes to live in Moab with his wife and two sons because there is, ironic to the whole breadbasket thing, a famine.

And in biblical storytelling, famine shifts the stakes, pushing people from their ancestral land.

So where once they were rooted and at home they become strangers.

And curiously, there is this neutrality to the opening line.

Like we don't exactly know if we are meant to be critical of this man's choice.

We just don't know.

Should we question why it's just this guy's family who leaves and not others?

Is there this implication that he had the means to go and others did not?

So his wealth, it saves him, but does nothing for his neighbors?

I mean, that's what some of the rabbis suggest anyway.

But again, Ruth is a text that isn't interested in the bad guys.

This is prologue, and the meaning isn't actually in the past.

Now, I'm all for understanding your personal past.

I even preached a sermon this fall called Learning to Listen to Your Ancestors.

But right out of the gate here, I want to orient you to the energy of Ruth, to pull you toward a brighter future.

And this isn't a future that bypasses human involvement in favor of just waiting for God to act.

At every stop in this story of Ruth, you will see people considering their options,

problem -solving with others, acting strategically and deliberately, putting just one foot in front of the other,

knowing their rights, and advocating for their future.

Here's the deal with all that.

You might go your whole life and not actually be able to piece together the miracles that flow through your ordinary story.

Don't you think it's miraculous that you can turn struggle into some kind of wisdom for yourself.

That you can actually find love after you've been really hurt.

That you can rebuild after something precious has been stolen.

Ruth's prologue is tough right now.

But it is going to tip us toward a brighter world.

I think we need that right now. But first, some specifics.

Let's get to the who is who.

So the man's name was Elimelech, and his wife's name was Naomi.

And the names of his two sons were Malon and Kilion.

And they were Ephrathites from Bethlehem in Judah.

And they went to Moab, and they lived there.

Now Elimelech, Naomi's husband, died and she was left with her two sons.

So after no names were given in verse 1, we get this fire hose of proper nouns in verses 2 and 3.

Elimelech, Naomi, Malon, Kilion, all Ephrathites from Bed Brath,

bread basket, I knew I was going to do that, bread basket Bethlehem.

You try and say it three times really fast.

Bread basket Bethlehem in Judah.

And all these names, they actually have special meaning.

Elimelech means God my king.

Malon means weakly.

Kilion means to waste away.

And Naomi means pleasant or sweet.

And those are these breadcrumbs that will guide the whole story.

But let's take a moment to talk about Moab.

Moab is meant to stand in for a place of extreme extreme foreignness.

You see, back in Genesis 19, Sodom and Gomorrah have burned to the ground on account of unrelenting wickedness.

And alone with their father

Lot, two daughters think that they are the only people left in the world.

And so they get their dad super drunk, and their incestuous plan results in two sons,

one of whom is Moab.

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Adding more fuel to the foreigner fire when the Israelites were hightailing it out of Egypt after their enslavement,

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the Moabites, we're told, did not help them out with a little bit of food or water for their journey.

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But, you ask, is there more reason to distrust these Moabites?

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Why, yes, there is.

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In Numbers 22 to 25, the king of Moab attempts to curse Israel through a prophet, and while that doesn't work,

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the Israelites still mess around with the Moabites, have sex with them, and sacrifice to their gods.

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These are two people groups that do not get along.

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They have history and stories that they tell themselves to justify themselves about that history.

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At some point, though, they were family.

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Lot was Abraham's nephew, but eventually their descendants became estranged.

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And while it's easy to look back on these ancient stories and think, you dum -dums, what a mess you have made of things.

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Let's be honest here.

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estrangement is a prickly and personal reality in many of our families.

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It's thought that up to one in four people are impacted by some form of estrangement.

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In addition, when asked about it, each side in estrangement lives in a totally different version of the story.

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While one side attempts to establish new boundaries, the other side feels totally blindsided.

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I'll tell you one thing that I know.

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Estrangement is horrible because it comes from desperation.

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In trying to understand the other side's desperation feels pretty impossible most of the time.

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Maybe you didn't have to leave home because of a famine, but you did have to leave because it hurt you to stay.

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Or the flip side, after doing your best,

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the people you sacrificed so much for tell you that the home that you made for them wasn't good enough.

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I am so sorry for any estrangement.

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that you find yourself in.

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I know it feels like an immovable force in your life.

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And I know that that can haunt you.

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But what if all the boundaries and the heartbreaks and the clashing memories,

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what if they just aren't permanent?

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Because nothing is try to leave just a little

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ellipses in your estrangement just a dot dot dot toward some form of reconciliation even

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if you can't quite plot it out right now because even Israelites and Moabites,

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they find their way back to each other.

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And this story, it is a love story.

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So just put a pin in that for now.

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Back to Ruth's gritty prologue.

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Let's see what these fatherless men do next.

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They married Moabite women, one named Orpah and the other

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Ruth, and they had lived, after they had lived there for 10 years, both Malon and Kilian also died,

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and Naomi was left without her two sons and her husband.

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In just four

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Hebrew words, Naomi loses the hope of a third generation.

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Married 10 years, neither of the sons have babies.

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In fact, in Hebrew, verse 5 doesn't even spell out Naomi's name.

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It simply calls her Haisha, just the woman.

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Like it hurts too much to get that close.

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So before they know it, these three women are left without protection in a world that needs men to protect them.

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And at this point, you might be saying, why did I come to church today, Bobby?

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This story is bumming me out.

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I get it.

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The prologue certainly feels like it does.

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But as far as literature is concerned,

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a tragedy is when you begin with life and order and then end in ruin and death.

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Ruth is not a tragedy.

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Ruth is tragedy's inversion.

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A better way to think of the story of Ruth is to note

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that we are just not at the funny parts yet.

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And I don't mean funny, ha -ha, but funny as it pertains to literature as comedy.

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A comedy makes this ascent.

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It goes from disorder and death to life and restoration.

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And yes, Act I in Ruth is where death and threat abound.

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But this is only the beginning.

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It is only prologue today.

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And none of this loss will define either Naomi or Ruth.

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These two women will show more agency and self -determination than almost anyone else in Scripture.

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Now, here's a little theory.

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I have.

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Throughout the entire book, the narrator only steps in to attribute an action to God directly two times.

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And neither of those attributions are here in the prologue.

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The first is in 1 verse 6, where Naomi hears third hand,

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actually, that God has remembered the people back in Judah and provided them with food.

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And that will get us rolling back to Bethlehem.

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And the second incident is when Ruth gets with Boaz in the final chapter and the Lord makes her conceive.

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And even there, no one hears from God directly.

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The narrator simply makes the scribal point.

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And my theory is that if you aren't used to having access to prophets and priests and temple rituals,

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if you have never heard a sacred story that reflects your experience,

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if the only times you knew that God spoke, it had to do with people who aren't like you,

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well then you don't even need God to speak to be a part of God's good story.

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Just by being alive, by pushing toward a better future, by getting through hard times,

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by choosing new family when yours falls apart, you define your life not by the worst parts,

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but by what you do with what you're left with.

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One of my favorite things you'll see about Ruth is that she does not wait for God to say that she's included.

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She just acts like she is.

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I love that.

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Some people wonder, maybe did a woman write Ruth?

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or at least did women pass along her story to each other until it was written down by a man?

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And who knows, but you can't help but trace this subversive perspective here.

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In Ezra and Nehemiah, for example, the priests and the leaders,

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they will oppose marriage by Jews to foreign women,

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particularly Ammonites and Moabites, the descendants of Lot's daughters.

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And Ruth reverses that.

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So while this story starts heavy, it moves on quickly to offer this alternative view of family that will,

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again, ultimately lead us to Jesus.

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In fact, after chapter 1, our heroines don't dwell on their past anymore.

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Again, we know that there's so much tragedy here in the prologue, but it doesn't exactly stick to them.

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They refuse to be defined by the sickly story of others, the grief that they certainly move through,

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and the infertility that threatened to halt their family name.

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The thing you need to remember about Ruth is that it is designed with this perfect symmetry.

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Chapter one mirrors chapter four, chapter two mirrors chapter three.

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So listen for that in the weeks to come.

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But for today, you can actually see the symmetry when you compare the prologue with the epilogue.

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So we're going to kind of cheat a little bit and look at that.

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In chapter one verses one to five, of course, we're introduced to this family story as if it's a family story of death.

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But chapter 4, verses 18 to 22, the very end of this book, will give us a family story of life.

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The epilogue will name descendants until we arrive where this little book has been driving all along.

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Thanks to Ruth, a foreigner.

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A Moabite, Boaz, whom we'll meet in chapter two, will have a son named Obed, and Obed will have a son named Jesse,

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and Jesse will have a son named David, and of course, that's

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King David to you.

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So don't go thinking that your story is over or already written

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or too broken to count for something your life is looping around in a sacred circle too

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and by the time you come back around to the place you thought would break you a look

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there's something special right there

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in the thing that makes you different that makes you desperate for change that makes you long for more

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it is this very thing this restless rebuilding

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that will be the gift that you have to give to the world

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the next part of your story it just might reflect the last hard parts opposite

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you don't get the attention you needed as a child

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well now look at you giving

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so much attention to the children in your life you come from a broken family

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or had parents whose marriage was

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so toxic well now look at you forming partnership as true

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equals your grandparents as they aged their world their thinking their interests

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they got smaller now look at you learning new things as you age

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this to me is one of life's greatest gifts that we get to make of something new

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when we've been given something quite hard thanks to the hidden

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work of god in partnership with the deliberate work of our healing phyllis tribble says

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that in ruth the human movements they are open and deliberate,

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while the divine activity is hidden and fortuitous.

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So today, may you remember what that kind of hope might look like.

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It's trust that even when a story starts with pain, God is not far off.

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that maybe God is so close

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that we can hardly tell God apart from the world

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that we live in and the world that we work to make a little bit better right now.

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In Everything, Trust God - Bishop Barron #faith #love #motivation #shorts #life #amen

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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

This speaking lesson is built on the video “When Family Falls Apart”. This video has 233 sentences and 2778 words to shadow. The speech runs for 22:40. The speaker talks at a steady 123 words per minute, a comfortable pace for shadowing. 83% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.

Key vocabulary in this video

15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:

Word	Pronunciation	Meaning
verse noun	/ˈvɝs/	A poetic form with regular meter and a fixed rhyme scheme.
famine noun	/ˈfæm.ɪn/	Extreme shortage of food in a region.
tragedy noun	/ˈtɹæd͡ʒ.ɪ.di/	A drama or similar work, in which the main character is brought to ruin or otherwise suffers the extreme consequences of some tragic flaw or weakness of…
basket noun	/ˈbæskɪt/	A lightweight woven container, generally round, open at the top, and tapering toward the bottom.
rebuild verb	/ɹiːˈbɪld/	To build again or anew.
scripture noun	/ˈskɹɪpt͡ʃɚ/	A sacred writing or holy book.
partnership noun	/ˈpɑɹtnɚʃɪp/	The state of being associated with a partner.
mirror noun	/ˈmiɹɚ/	A smooth surface, usually made of glass with reflective material painted on the underside, that reflects light so as to give an image of what is in front of it.
bonus noun	/ˈbəʊ.nəs/	Something extra that is good; an added benefit.
horror noun	/ˈhɒɹ.ə/	An intense distressing emotion of fear or repugnance.
steal verb	/stiːl/	To take illegally, or without the owner's permission, something owned by someone else without intending to return it.
reflect verb	/ɹɪˈflɛkt/	To bend back (light, etc.) from a surface.
priest noun	/ˈpɹiːst/	A religious clergyman (clergywoman, clergyperson) who is trained to perform services or sacrifices at a church or temple.
define verb	/dɪˈfaɪn/	To determine with precision; to mark out with distinctness; to ascertain or exhibit clearly.
wisdom noun	/ˈwɪzdəm/	An element of personal character that enables one to distinguish the wise from the unwise.

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Word	Pronunciation	Meaning
break down verb		To stop functioning.
come back verb		To return to a place.
fall apart verb		To disintegrate, to break into pieces.
get along verb		To interact or coexist well, without argument or trouble.
get through verb	/ɡɛt ˈθɹu/	To overcome; to endure.
knock out verb		To strike or bump (someone or something) out.
pass along verb		To deliver a message or item to its intended recipient.
spell out verb		To form (a word) from letters; say the letters in a word.

Sentences worth repeating

Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:

That you can actually find love after you've been really hurt?
That you can rebuild after something precious has been stolen?
You think you could do it?
Some of you could?
She's the great -great -grandmother of?

Grammar in this video

The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:

Structure	In the video
Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it	you've been really hurt · has been stolen · is embedded
Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now	you've been · has been stolen · have burned
Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing	Bethlehem, which means · people who aren

Pronunciation to watch

The speaker uses 39 contractions and reduced forms, such as don't, we're, aren't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.

The “th” sounds: grandmother /ˈɡɹæn(d)ˌmʌðɚ/, threaten /ˈθɹɛt.n̩/, warmth /wɔɹmθ/
The “sh” and “zh” sounds: partnership /ˈpɑɹtnɚʃɪp/, desperation /ˌdɛspəˈɹeɪʃən/, establish /ɪˈstæb.lɪʃ/, determination /dɪˌtɜːmɪˈneɪʃən/, restoration /ɹɛstəˈɹeɪʃən/
Long words — get the stress right: deliberate /dɪˈlɪb.(ə.)ɹət/, desperation /ˌdɛspəˈɹeɪʃən/, ordinary /ˈɔɹdɪnɛɹi/, stability /stəˈbɪlɪti/, determination /dɪˌtɜːmɪˈneɪʃən/

How to practise with this video

Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
Shadow it sentence by sentence at normal speed, repeating each one until your rhythm matches the speaker.
Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like verse, famine, tragedy.

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing technique: read the full step-by-step guide →

Shadowing Practice: When Family Falls Apart - Learn English Speaking with Video

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