She was a Canaanite girl with a window on the wall of Jericho, a working girl in a city of idols and false gods. She had heard the stories of the Hebrews coming across the desert. The Red Sea. The wilderness. The God who fought for them. Something in her already believed before the spies ever knocked on her door.

Then they did knock. Two Hebrew strangers, hunted by her own city's soldiers. She hid them on her roof under flax stalks. She lied to the soldiers' faces. She made the men promise her family would be saved when the city fell. They told her to hang a scarlet cord in her window, anyone inside with the cord would be spared.

The night the spies left, she paid out the scarlet cord with both hands from her windowsill atop the wall, soldiers' torches in the streets just outside, the cord catching lamp-light from inside her room. Days later, the walls fell. Her family lived. She married a man named Salmon. She had a son named Boaz, who married a Moabite girl named Ruth, who became the great-grandmother of King David, who became the ancestor of Jesus. The outsider with the scarlet cord ended up in the family tree of the Messiah.