The Gospel of Ruth

I've been reading a book called The Gospel of Ruth by Carolyn Custis James. While not earth-shattering, she does a good job expositing the book of Ruth in Scripture. And one of the themes of the book, dealing with suffering and difficulty in life, has, for obvious reasons, resonated with me. A couple of quotes I've liked:



"The bible doesn't teach us that God is working from some divine balance sheet and will eventually even up accounts so that we recover our losses and our sacrifices are repaid. It's obvious to anyoe who has experienced a sifnificant losss that the sorrows of this world and the wounds they inflict in our souls cannot be compensated no matter how much good fortune and propsperity come our way."



"The dark night of the soul is an awful place to be, but that's where God trains his best warriors. Although Naomi looked and felt as if her life was being dismantled and she was being put out of action, God was actually raising her up and equipping her for a mission-critical assignment in his kingdom. No psalm bears the name Naomi as the lyricist. But traces of her theology are scattered all through the psalms of David (whose grandfather Obed Naomi helped raise)."



"(God) does not coddle us, for he wants us to be strong. He takes us through deep waters so we will learn wisdom and know him for ourselves. Our lives are not perfect. We have empty places in our hearts. But we are grounded in the truth that he loves us, and that' what keeps us going. He is changing us. He wants us to change our world."


The deep water imagery has continued to be an apt description of the grieving process for me the last few weeks, although my day-to-day experience is often more of bobbing along on the top of the water. It's unclear to me if things are actually getting easier when it's not as heavy, or if circumstances just propel me upwards by default; kids, ministry, just getting everything done that needs to be attended to no matter how I'm feeling... these don't leave me a lot of space to be in the heavier, deeper places emotionally. So I'm trying to carve out more time alone than I needed in earlier seasons of my life, to make time for being by myself with no agenda, to visit the cemetary where Midi and Nathan are, to just be so that whatever emotions that don't get expressed when I'm on the "surface" can come out. Hence having the time for reading The Gospel of Ruth, which struck a helpful chord with me.