The River Girls are currently doing a book study of, “The Girl’s Still Got It” by Liz Curtis Higgs, where we get to take a walk with Ruth and the God who rocked her world.
This week we talked about how raw and real Ruth got when she looked Naomi in the face and in so many words said to her, “Too bad lady, where you go I’ll go. You do not have a choice in the matter because I will follow you wherever you go. You are stuck with me, so there.” Ruth took a stand and told her mother in law where it was at, end of story. I also noticed how Ruth willingly stepped out of a place of comfort…(living in her own land – among her own people – with the gods she worshiped her entire life), and offered to lay her life down to serve her former, grieving, and seemingly very bitter, mother-in-law. That girl had guts!
This makes me think about the people who have been willing to love me past the pain I was in and the bitterness that flowed from my mouth because of the extreme disappointments I had been slapped with. On my own, there seemed to be no human way to empty the bitterness that had welled up in my soul. Thankfully, God had other plans. He sent these precious ones to me to call me up to a higher place with a different view of life. They could see things I could not see, and they refused to allow me to remain in my stinky, depressed state. They relentlessly loved me by ignoring and pushing past the hurt – and helped me find hope outside of my current circumstances.
I think that this may be one of the reasons that God clearly instructs us to not “forsake the gathering of the saints” (Heb 10:25) because we need each other, especially when it gets rough. We need trustworthy ones to speak into our lives at times that we are incapable of seeing things clearly on our own. These encouragers helped me discover that I still had value, that God still had big plans for me, and that I still had a lot more to offer in this world. Wow! I can never thank them enough for laying their lives down for me.
When you think about it, we all need a “Ruth” (or two) in our lives…and we need to be a Ruth. We may end up being the eyes for someone else who desperately needs to see the truth.
