Have you ever read in the Bible the book of Ruth? It is a wonderful true story, desperate in the beginning, turning tragic shortly thereafter, but in the end, opening like a flower into the greatest love story ever told.
In chapter one, we come upon the scene to find a husband, wife, and two sons leaving their homeland of Bethlehem during a famine to find sustenance in the foreign country of Moab. Sometime after their arrival, the husband passes away. His two sons, coming of age, each take a Moabite wife. After a period of ten years, they too depart from this earth and with their deaths leave the women in their lives in dire straights. (For in those days, to survive, women were totally dependent on the men of the family.) Not knowing what else to do, the matriarch decides it would be best to return to her homeland. Along the way thinking about what would be best for her widowed daughters-in-law, she tries to send them back to their kinsmen. One returns but the other insists on staying. Thus the story about Ruth, the one who remained, begins.
Most of the time, because the book is titled after her—and rightly so—complete focus is on what happens to Ruth, how she meets her future husband, Boaz, and the eternal significance of that meeting and their future love. (Jesus’ lineage comes through the marriage of Ruth and Boaz.) As beautiful, pivotal, and monumental that is for all mankind, lately my heart has been thinking on Naomi, Ruth’s mother-in-law. What happens to her—the hopelessness and utter desolation of loss—is all part of her story. It, too, is one of love, but of a different kind.