This devotion is an excerpt from the book, The Gospel of Ruth: Loving God Enough to Break the Rules and was written by Carolyn Custis James. We hope you will be encouraged.
A Female Job:
So what was Naomi thinking as she sifted through the ruins of her life and contemplated the God she had believed in since she was a child? Did she mutter a “So much for your God” to herself? What did her two Moabite daughters-in-law think after witnessing the tsunamis that swept away Naomi’s world without a whisper of interference from her God? Not only were they eyewitnesses of their mother-in-law’s losses, they were caught in the tidal wave of her sorrows and were drowning in grief themselves. The collapse of Naomi’s world did not happen in a day but was spread out over years of heartache and tragedy. There were no heroic rescue workers rushing in to carry her to safety, no grim-faced news anchors choking back the tears as they reported a relentless sequence of disasters that sent her into shock, no half-mast flags or weeping nation to grieve her losses. Naomi’s grief was a long time coming, the buildup of years of major disappointments, setbacks, and losses retold by the biblical narrator as cold facts in five short verses, without so much as a sigh or a tear. I never connected emotionally with Naomi’s losses until I heard her compared to the legendary sufferer Job. That got my attention. Until then, her sufferings seemed to serve as props to set up the real drama — the love story between Ruth and Boaz. In my eagerness to get to the part where Boaz enters the narrative, I stepped over a shattered Naomi and, in the process, missed the real power of the story — a story of a woman’s struggle with God. Glossing over Naomi’s agonies comes at a high price, for by minimizing Naomi’s pain, we inadvertently minimize our own. We owe it to Naomi and to ourselves to stop and contemplate the collapsing towers in Naomi’s life — to sit with her for a while at ground zero — for without a better grasp of her sufferings, we will miss the impact of her doubts about God and the power of the Gospel of Ruth.
James, Carolyn Custis. The Gospel of Ruth: Loving God Enough to Break the Rules (pp. 37-38). (Function). Kindle Edition.
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