Tough Choices

When times are difficult we can trust the Lord.

The sky metamorphosed slowly from gray to pink. The three women, wearing heavy veils that announced their widowhood, trudged along without speaking.

Ruth sighed. She and her sister-in-law, Orpah, had started out the journey from Moab to Bethlehem trying to act cheerful and enthusiastic. They had sung songs until they couldn't think of any more. Then they sang all the old ones again until they were sick of them. Then they told all the jokes they could remember. Eventually they fell silent and just walked. Ruth felt as though they had plodded forward for a very long time. But they still had a long way to go, and this was only the second day of their trek.

Ruth's calf muscles ached. The pack on her back rubbed sores created the day before, and the weariness sitting on her shoulders lingered from a sleepless night. She had known many such wakeful nights since her husband had died.

Even now her mind turned to thoughts of Mahlon, with his large brown eyes, slow smile, and slender fingers. He'd had a tender spirit that she depended on. But his gentleness hadn't saved him from the fever that quickly wasted his body and stole his life--the same fever that took his brother's life. She pushed the images of Mahlon's hot face and fiery eyes out of her mind. She didn't want to remember that part. She would remember him before the illness. Before widowhood.

"Widow," Ruth softly uttered the word, still trying to assimilate it as her new designation. It was a willowy word without substance that swayed with each breeze of adversity. Much like she felt without Mahlon.

She glanced over to Orpah. Pretty Orpah, of the dancing eyes and feet, was lost in her own thoughts. She didn't seem as pretty now--now that the music had left her life.

They felt sad and lost, both of them. But no more so than Ruth's widowed mother-in-law, Naomi, who trudged on slightly ahead of the young women. Maybe she was eager to be home in Bethlehem, out of Moab. Or maby she was pushed forward by a sorrow that propelled her like a prod in the back. Naomi had always stood rod straight, back unbent, but now she walked with stooped shoulders, worn down by the burden of so many losses. Her spirit seemed almost broken.

The two young women were moving to a new town because of Naomi. That she might find consolation with her old neighbors. That she might sit around the evening fire with friends who remembered more joyful times--before the famine caused Naomi's family to move, before her husband had died, before she had lost her sons, before ten hard years had passed. Maybe the light in Naomi's eyes, her lively spirit, and her lovely smile would return. And maybe she would find her God again, the God whom she seemed to have lost. The God she had believed in wholeheartedly when Ruth first met her.

For Naomi, Ruth had packed her few belongings and set her mind to move to Bethlehem, to give up her gods, to become the foreigner--and to be seen as a heathen one at that.

For Naomi you will do this, Ruth told herself, shooing away a fly. The sun began gathering its heat and directing it onto the widows who had so far to walk. So she can find life and her God again, you will do this...