Where You Go, I Will Go

Three widows stood on the road out of Moab, and the oldest was telling the other two to go home.

Go back to your mothers’ houses, Naomi said. May the Lord be kind to you, the way you were kind to the dead and to me. May each of you find rest in the house of a new husband. She kissed them, and they all wept out loud.

The two younger women said no. They’d go with her.

Naomi said it again. Turn back, my daughters. Why would you come with me? Do I have more sons in my womb who could grow up to be your husbands? She was old, with nothing left to offer, and she was right. They wept again.

Then Orpah kissed her mother-in-law and turned back toward home.

But Ruth clung to her.

When someone tells you, kindly and more than once, to go on with your life, going is usually the right call. Orpah went, and the text never says a word against her. Ruth heard the same speech on the same road and did the other thing.

Start with what Ruth wasn’t.

She wasn’t an Israelite. She was from Moab, across the river, a people Israel was told by law to keep out of the assembly. Deuteronomy says it in so many words: no Moabite shall enter the assembly of the Lord, to the tenth generation. Wrong nationality, wrong religion, wrong ancestors, and a statute on the books about her.

She was a young widow with no children. Her husband had been an Israelite whose family came to Moab to escape a famine. His father died. Then he and his brother both died. What was left was three widows, in a world where a widow with no son had no standing, no income, and no future.

Naomi decided to go home to Bethlehem, and that’s how they came to be on the road.

When Naomi saw that Orpah had gone and Ruth hadn’t, she tried once more. Look, your sister-in-law has gone back to her people and her gods. Go with her.

Ruth answered.

Do not urge me to leave you or to return from following you. For where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there will I be buried. May the Lord do so to me and more also if anything but death parts me from you.

People read that at weddings. It wasn’t said at one. It was said by a young widow to an old one, on a road, with no plan past the next town.

The speech has no vision in it. No cause. No sense of purpose in the way people use the word now. She doesn’t say I feel called to Israel or I have a mission. She says I’m not leaving you. That’s the entire content. One person, in front of her, about to be alone, and Ruth decided she wouldn’t be.

When they arrived in Bethlehem the whole town stirred, and the women said, Is this Naomi? And Naomi said: don’t call me Naomi, which means pleasant. Call me Mara, which means bitter. I went away full, and the Lord has brought me back empty.

Standing next to her while she said empty was Ruth. The old woman didn’t count her. Ruth stayed anyway.

Then the work, which was not glamorous.

It was barley harvest. Israel had a law that when you reaped a field you left the edges and didn’t go back for what you dropped, so the poor and the foreigner could come behind the reapers and pick up what was left. Gleaning. It was the welfare system of the day, it was humbling, and it was what Ruth had.

She went out and gleaned. All day, behind the hired hands, picking up dropped stalks in a stranger’s field, and the text says she kept at it from early morning with only a short rest. The foreman noticed. The owner, a man named Boaz, noticed and asked who she was. What he’d heard about her wasn’t her religion or her nationality. It was this: All that you have done for your mother-in-law since the death of your husband has been fully told to me, and how you left your father and mother and your native land and came to a people you did not know.

That’s what went ahead of her into town. Not a testimony. Not a résumé. A report that she’d stayed with one old woman when she didn’t have to.

Boaz told his workers to let extra fall on purpose. He had her eat with them. She went home that night with an ephah of barley, somewhere around thirty pounds, and Naomi, who had been calling herself bitter, sat up.

The rest of the book is Naomi coming back to life.

She starts scheming. She’s the one who works out that Boaz is a relative, that there’s a legal path open, and she sends Ruth to the threshing floor at night with instructions that would have been a scandal if they’d gone wrong. Ruth does exactly what she’s told. Boaz, a decent man in a book that’s short on drama and long on decency, settles it properly in front of the elders at the town gate and marries her.

They have a son. And the women of Bethlehem, the same ones who’d watched Naomi come home empty, said to her: He shall be to you a restorer of life and a nourisher of your old age, for your daughter-in-law who loves you, who is more to you than seven sons, has given birth to him.

More than seven sons. That’s the verdict on Ruth, and it came from the neighbors.

Loyalty to one person in front of you is a purpose. It isn’t the small thing done while waiting for the real one. In this book it’s the only thing she did, and everything else turned on it.

Where this meets your week

Here’s who the one person might be.

The parent who’s fading. There may be a mother or father in a facility or a spare bedroom who needs the kind of showing up that doesn’t fit on a calendar. Ruth gleaned all day and came home and handed Naomi the barley. The visits, the forms, the same story heard again, the doctor who won’t call back. That’s the field. Nobody will write it down. Pick the next ordinary task on that list and do it this week without waiting to be asked.

The friend who was just widowed. If you’ve buried a spouse, you already know about week six, when the food stops coming and everyone assumes the worst is over. If you haven’t, take it from the people who have. Pick one newly widowed friend and be there at week six, and week seven. Coffee, an errand, a drive, no agenda. Ruth’s speech was made to someone who’d told her three times to go away. Your friend will say they’re fine. Go anyway.

The friendship the leaving put at risk. If you left a church, or a job, or a town, some of your friendships were tied to the building, and they went quiet when you walked out of it. Ruth left her country and her gods and kept the one person. You don’t need to share a pew or an office with someone to stay with them. Call the one you miss most and set a date. Leaving a place doesn’t have to mean leaving the person.

The Naomi who says go live your life. A parent says it. A friend says it about their illness. A sibling says it about the long recovery. You don’t have to do this. Naomi said it three times on one road. The people who most need someone to stay are often the first to give permission to leave. Hear the permission, thank them for it, and stay.

What Ruth did fits in two sentences, and neither one needs a title.

Pick one person and stay. You probably already know who. Somebody who’s about to be alone, or already is, and who has been telling you, sensibly, to get on with your life. Say some version of where you go I will go, in words that won’t embarrass either of you, and mean it for the next year, not just the next visit.

Then go to the field. Do the plain work that staying requires, the rides and the meals and the phone calls and the sitting there, and don’t grade it against what you thought you were supposed to be doing instead. The neighbors will notice before you do.

When the boy was born, Naomi took him and laid him in her lap and cared for him. The neighbor women gave him his name. A son has been born to Naomi, they said, to the woman who had come home empty.

They called him Obed. He was the father of Jesse, and Jesse was the father of David.