Ruth: Take Two

I know, we already covered Ruth.

But I love the quiet of the car

When I’m driving

Or otherwise unoccupied.

When thoughts and things come out

Loud and clear

Sometimes something someone said or did

Or something I read

And this story just tumbled and tumbled.

I love how this collection of chapters is called Ruth

But how it’s really about Naomi.

This story of family

Of mothers and sons and daughters in law.

Of hunger and famine and scarcity

And finding enough

And discovering abundance and plenty. 

It feels like a soft story

With more of a Jane Austen feel

Than Charles Dickens.

So much propriety.

It shows a lot about loyalty

And love

And hanging onto each other

Through thick and thin. 

Ch 1 “Where you go I will go,

And where you stay I will stay. 

Your people will be my people

And your God my God.”

I will make your homeland

My homeland. 

Til they bury me beside you.  

I hope this single story was not an isolated occurrence throughout Israel.  Not an exception in those seemingly dark days.   This story of putting one foot in front of the other moving from emptiness to fullness, from bitterness to hope. Naomi’s heart dry as a week-old bread crust.   I think I would want to go home, and stay home, and curl up into a fetal position.  But she didn’t.   So much courage.

Today, in these cold, short daylight days I love a warm story.  One that talks about the kindness between people in a world where we don’t always have time, or take time for the long parts of life and love and relationship. 

I think this story is unexpected.  Maybe it doesn’t coincide with our presuppositions of what life might be like in a family of mixed cultures. The typical future for a couple of widows living in a foreign land with no one to look out for them would be so bleak and bare. 

But God rewrites the whole story.

He rewrites stories everyday. 

Taking stories

to completely different destinations

than the road signs indicate.  

We can hold onto Hope. 

Letting go of today for God’s tomorrow. 

It’s so hard to rethink the impossible.  

God’s Plan instead of ours.