How We Spend Our Love--October 11, 2023
[Naomi said to Ruth:] "See, your sister-in-law has gone back to her people and to her gods; return after your sister-in-law." But Ruth said,
"Do not press me to leave you
or to turn back from following you!
Where you go, I will go;
where you lodge, I will lodge;
your people shall be my people,
and your God my God.
Where you die, I will die--
there I will be buried.
May the LORD do thus and so to me,
and more as well,
if even death parts me from you!"
When Naomi saw that she was determined to go with her, she said no more to her. [Ruth 1:15-18]
Rather than measuring love in the number of red roses bought for Valentine's Day, a better assessment is the degree to which you will rearrange the trajectory of your life for someone else.
If you are unwilling to be inconvenienced for another person, it's a pretty good sign you don't care about them--after all, people even hold the door open for strangers all the time. But on the other hand, if someone has been willing to change jobs, relocate, or overturn their plans, because you need them to do it, there's a pretty good chance that person loves you. And when you find yourself supported by one or more people who will leave their comfortable familiar routines and uproot everything to be where you are, well, you know what it is like to be loved deeply and well. The people who bind their lives to ours show us what it looks like for love to endure.
Now, to be sure, sometimes we see that kind of enduring love in romance and marriage--the promises that spouses make to each other are precisely about the commitment to join your lives and their trajectories together for the long haul. But it's also what all parents do for their children, rearranging their time, energy, effort, and strength for the raising of small humans. And it's what grandparents and other relatives do, and even what other relatives or close friends might do on occasion, too. In fact, it's exactly what Ruth does for her mother-in-law, Naomi. Ruth gives us a glimpse, in perfectly ordinary "non-religious" terms, of the way love endures--she uproots her entire life to go to be with her mother-in-law Naomi after tragedy has taken both their husbands, father and son, from them.
This is one of those stories in the Bible that deserves more attention, I will confess. And even when the book of Ruth does get talked about, often it's the romantic-dramedy of the second half that often gets talked about, especially because it ends as a sort of prequel to the family line of good King David (spoiler alert!). But before any of the will-they-won't-they tension between Ruth and Boaz (they will, and they do, and it involves a threshing floor), there is this amazing promise of enduring love from Ruth for her mother-in-law Naomi.
In fact, the word the Hebrew text of this book uses to describe Ruth's love for her mother is a pretty special word often used to describe none other than God's love for the people of Israel. In Hebrew, it is pronounced something like "hesed", and it is translated as "lovingkindness" or "steadfast love" or "covenant loyalty." There's a sense of more than a fleeting feeling here--it's about the commitment to bind her life to Naomi's, to seek Naomi's well-being even at the cost of her own, and to stick with her through thick and thin, no matter what. You can hear it in the strong words of her promise to her mother-in-law: where you go, I'll go; where you die, I will die; your people and God will be my people and God. It is Ruth building her life around Naomi, for whatever Naomi may need in the time to come. And when the Bible looks at that story, the biblical writers go, "There--that's what love is like. That's even a pretty good picture for what God's love is like."
I am reminded of that line of Zadie Smith, who says "Time is how you spend your love." And I think she's right--in so many ways, the currency of love is our minutes, hours, days, and years of life. The ways we give our time to other people reveal that they matter. And the choices we make to spend that time where someone else needs us to be, those are what real love is built on. It's not just true of husbands or wives, but in all of our relationships, if you want to grow in love for someone, give them your time and watch it affect your affections. If you want someone else to know that they are loved, go out of your way to spend time with them--especially when you could have been doing something else.
The more I think about it, the more I think part of God's brilliance in making sure that Ruth and Naomi's story was preserved is that God has given us a sort of key for unlocking all the relationships that matter--God's relationship with us as well as our relationship back to God and toward others. The whole story of the Bible is really God's unfolding choice to rearrange everything for the sake of being with us... and then the more we grow in faith, the more we see that responding to God's love often means that we rearrange our lives, our values, and our use of time and treasure to align with what matters to God. God has moved heaven and earth to be with us, even coming to be among us as one of us in Jesus. And in a parallel way, Jesus calls us like those first disciples dropping their nets to follow, to let our lives be rearranged around him and his way in the world. And then we are dared together to let our lives be spent showing love to neighbors, friends, strangers, and <gasp!> enemies as well. We aren't called to buy all of those folks roses, but we are called to let their needs shape the trajectory of our lives as we spend our time to love them.
Today, we are invited to face the world with two truths directing our vision: one, that none other than the living God has chosen to bind God's own life to ours in steadfast love, "come hell or high water," as they say, like Ruth binding her life to Naomi's. And second, that such love is meant to become our way of life for others. And in the end, a lifetime spent giving our time away like that turns out to be worth more than all the bouquets of roses in the world.
Lord God, show us today how we might bind our lives to the needs of others the way you have first loved us faithfully and steadfastly.
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