The story of Ruth is such a lovely one. It’s a story we can read and enjoy for its joyous ending and happy outcome for all the main characters. There was the big moment that is often written and preached about when she tells Naomi not to try to persuade her to go back to her people. The moment when she declares that she has made up her mind, and she is going to stay with Naomi, belong to her people and her God. Ruth 1:16.
Today however, it is the ordinary things that Ruth did, in virtual obscurity, that have taken my attention, because Ruth didn’t just make the big gesture, she followed it up with faithful, but relatively mundane, service with no spotlight on her, and no hope of any earthly reward.
We know the story, how Ruth a Moabite, married into an Israelite family after they had emigrated to Moab from Bethlehem, during a time of famine. The family hits tragedy and all the men, namely her husband, father in law and brother in law, die leaving the three women to fend for themselves. Naomi, Ruth’s mother in law, decides to go back to her roots in Judah and Ruth sacrificially insists on going with her.
She chose the unglamorous route, away from the chance of a remarriage, and went with Naomi in order to ‘look after her’ for the rest of her life. She then sets about working to feed them both. It was hard work too. Gleaning in the fields, would have been back breaking and very hot work for long hours, it could also dangerous for an unattached woman. In other words she chose to serve in the everyday and ordinary tasks of life, potentially away from any human praise or affirmation.
The point I am making is that this lass had no status, power, prestige, fortune or anything else to make her stand out from the millions of other young women who have lived similar lives, and yet her story has been written to encourage us all. As far as Ruth was concerned she was an unknown widow, doing an unspectacular job, caring for her mother-in-law, but our God ‘saw’ and was delighted with her. No wonder God chose to put her, a gentile woman, into the genealogy of Jesus. Matthew1:5
Ruth’s story gives us a clue about what the Lord honours. Just think, she lived in a small agricultural community several thousand years ago, even before the Israelites had a king. The best way I can visualise her world is from my school history books that described an Anglo Saxon village, though of course Ruth lived nearly a thousand years before that time. She cared, she served and she worked hard.
She was like so many unsung heroes and heroines who just get on with life and do their best to care for others along the way, and I believe that in heaven all our stories are noted and recorded, and it may be that all our stories will be told in heaven. What we do know is that there is a cloud of witnesses cheering us on, Hebrews 12:1, and we know that the whole of creation is waiting for the manifestation of the sons (and daughters) of God. Romans 8:19. It matters how we live and what we do when no one seems to be looking.
So if your life seems full of the mundane and ordinary, consider Ruth and, while making every effort to live that life ‘full of the Spirit’, thank God today that He is in the ordinary and the everyday. Thank Him for His presence with you, because if He is with you, then whatever you are doing, every moment becomes a holy moment, and a chance to delight your Heavenly Father who ‘sees’ from heaven when no one else does.
