Crowds of faces bustled around her as she, a stranger in a
foreign land, tried to stumble through finding her way to what was now her new
home. Everything had changed. Everything was new. Why did everything have to be
so different? Even the smells and sights were not what she was accustomed to in
her old country. No one knew her here, she knew no one.
Had she made the right decision, she thought as she stood in the
middle of the crowded market street, colorful stalls of fruits, flowers, and
yards of silky cloth wove around the square. Yes, she could never doubt that
day when she stood at the cross roads a few miles out from Moab but miles away
from Judah. A day when she clung so desperately, grasping, dearly hanging onto
a belief, a hope. Tied to her past yet holding onto a possibility of a future,
she declared to Naomi, “Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you.
Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my
people and your God my God. May the Lord deal with me, be it ever severely, if
anything but death separates you and me.”* She spoke with such devotion and
desperate hope to her mother-in-law, an old lady who had lost her own husband
and two sons in a foreign land of Moab and now headed back to her home of Judah
with resolute sadness and not much more.
Ruth was a young woman whose past had intertwined her to this
immigrant Jewish family. Now, with her husband, Naomi’s son dead; she had
nothing. Not a nickel to her name. All she had was what made her who she was,
her decision, her desperate hope in a future, and a belief in a new faith to find a
purpose for her seemingly miserable life.
As she set towards her new home, she determined in her heart to
win favor in God’s eyes. Her resolution on this new day led her to happen
across God’s plan and purpose for her life. Her declaration of faith made a way
for God to step into her work in progress and guide her into a new destiny.
It may seem to be a simpleton’s desperate hope, a futile belief
in the unknown, the unseen but one decision made a destiny changing, life
altering, generational impact.
You may be at the crossroads of life, or in the middle of
something completely new, filled with so much change in your life. No matter
what, God knows you are a work in progress and His purpose for you is far more
than you could ever imagine. All it takes is faith to make a monumental life
changing decision as you step forward.
It also requires a desperate hope and the humility to cling dearly onto
a belief in Someone greater. His grace is more than enough.
*(Ruth 1:16-17)
