08/10/2016
I watched from a distance, as the young babe looked intently, into the eyes of the aged woman I had come to love so very much. She held him close, upon her bosom, and looked back, with the same intensity, now moistening her lips with the tears that had trickled down, through the wrinkled crevices, upon her face. A smile emerged, that had been absent for so many years, and the whisperings she uttered made me curious as to the recipient of such. Little did she know that the one she gazed upon would be in the blood line of none other than the son of God…Jesus! The wisp of the heated wind took me back to times, of extreme difficulty, that we mutually endured together when life was not so wonderful…
…My emotions were running violently unhindered and without restraint. The heat of the day equally matched the intensity of the ever relentless bugs circling my being and crawling everywhere. Some managed to bite my flesh sparsely revealed through my paltry clothing now drenched with sweat and stained from the labor of the day. I could hear, through the thickness of the corn field, the heart penetrating insults, directed towards me, that echoed within the stalks near, by those hired to harvest the yield that was now awaiting their attention. I simply waited as well, longing within that they would overlook a bit of the yield and or drop some as I gleaned the meager leftovers. Circumstances, beyond my control, played over and over within my thought process as the day crept by slowly and without compassion on its weary participants. I wept quietly, hoping, that none would hear me.
Sitting now on the ground from exhaustion, my back in an undesired, uncomfortable fixed hunch, I no longer was distracted by the bugs or heat. I could not help but remember the discouraging words, so callous, that poured forth with such ease, from my mother in law as we returned to her home in Bethlehem and wondered, now sitting alone in the poverty of my menial existence, if I had made a horrible mistake? “Call me not Naomi, call me Mara: for the Almighty hath dealt very bitterly with me. I went out full, and the LORD hath brought me home again empty: why thencall ye me Naomi, seeing the Lord hath testified against me, and the Almighty hath afflicted me?
Years earlier I had heard her speak with such passion about her God, the God of Abraham and His plan for our then enlarged family. She now spoke with little hope, weak and aged from the trials and tribulations that life had inflicted upon her without pity. I witnessed her heart, torn asunder, with the loss of her husband and left in a land raising two sons that would hold them as refugees from the famine that ravished so many areas. A few years later, her sons, one of which was my husband, would soon follow into the footsteps of their father with untimely deaths. She simply was not the same woman that I had come to admire and love without limitations. The smiles had diminished, the laughter had ceased and she was simply broken, physically, emotionally, spiritually and seemingly beyond repair. Her pleas for both me and Orpah, her other daughter in law, to go home to our parents, broke my heart to the full. I could not leave her alone and refused to see her try and “live” with little expectation, with no means of support and with the heartbreak that ravished a once large faith…
Father as I read of Ruth, the restoration that would follow for both her and her mother in law Naomi, I sit in absolute wonderment. When life, with its trials and tribulations, both outwardly and inwardly destroyed any faith once possessed by one of your children, as the great I AM, you were there! You were there in the midst of the circumstances, you were there in the corn fields with Ruth, you were there when Naomi spoke words that must have penetrated your very heart and you were there, Father, as the One that gleans at the most opportune time. You gleaned what others had cast away, you gleaned what others left behind, you gleaned what others had trampled upon as widowed women, in places of poverty and for those of a “humbled and contrite spirit.” We find much comfort in knowing that many of us, in similar heart breaking situations, can more than count on you to be the same in our lives. You desire nothing less, evident by your plan of redemption, by the giving of your Son, as the sacrificial lamb, than the realization that when life and its current and or coming atrocities appear in various forms, your Son, now sitting at your right hand, as the Great High Priest, “is able to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them.” It is too wonderful Father! The vast majority of us are not of this world and hold very little estate in the eyes of those that would look down upon us. In speaking of Abraham it was said, “and so, after he patiently endured, he obtained the promise.” Scripture pours forth this morning Father… “if any man will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.” The cross in its entirety represents nothing less than afflictions endured by pious men and woman, as a trial of their faith, conforming them to the example of their crucified master; and to do so daily! One can certainly understand the need for thine Spirit Father as in the flesh we find ourselves painfully weak, lacking the strength that can only come from thee to withstand the “wiles of the enemy.”
Father, there are those reading this morning that find themselves in places of despair, in places of discouragement, in places of hopelessness that they never could have imagined. The enemy, whispers, insults by his underlings, unconstrained, to the ears of your children. So our response this very hour shall simply be… we “therefore come boldly unto the throne room of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need.” As with Ruth, give us courage to be different, to go where others dare not go, to be subservient to your desire for our lives, to serve those that others would choose not to serve, to be counted worthy to be the embodiment of your Son. Naomi, in the end, was restored and though she looked down upon a babe with much love, we shall look up, from the foot of the cross, also with a face full of tears, and revel in all that was and is your Son, our Savior, Jesus. Recipients of love uncompromised, love unconditional and with a heritage unlike any other as children of God. “And if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with Him, that we may be also glorified together.”
We commit our lives into thine hands and though the words of Ruth were spoken to Naomi, may they be emblazoned upon our very hearts and spirits as we cry them out to you Father! “Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for where you will go, I will go…”
Daniel