Courageous women
August 22, 2022
I admire Naomi for many reasons. Reading the book or Ruth, she was not always the most God dependent woman. But she was real. Fleeing famine with her husband and young two sons, entering Moab was not what God directed.
Her sons married Moab women, which was not God directed either. Widowed and in an alien land, then both of her sons dying, she had reasons to be distraught, even bitter, and she was. Yet she chose to return home. A hard and dangerous choice. Her foreign daughter-in-law wanted to accompany her. Naomi knew there would be discrimination, even hostility to this outsider.
Even with Naomi’s less than ‘all out for God’ behavior, Ruth wanted what Naomi had. Authentic, real, and then relentless to return home, her witness won Ruth to God.