“God is in control and has a reason for everything, even if we don’t see it right now.”

I must confess this was at one time the way I made dealt with suffering in my life and it still is. How I made sense of life in my twenties and how I make sense of it in my sixties, however, is very different.

What has made that difference? I guess there have been many things, but the game changer has been, surprisingly, a tiny three-chapter book found in the Old Testament. The book of Ruth.

During a time of famine, Naomi and her husband Elimelek and her two sons left Bethlehem and went to live in Moab. There her two sons married the Moabite women Ruth and Orpah. Eventually Elimelek and her sons died. Hearing that there no longer was famine in Judah, Naomi determined to return to Bethlehem.

Naomi says these arresting words to Ruth and Orpah as she returns, “The Lord’s hand has turned against me!” (v 11) She acknowledges her bitterness and the dismal future that awaits her without any sons to care for her.

At the same time, earlier in her conversation she says to her daughters-in-law who were accompanying her back to Judah, “May the Lord show you kindness, as you have shown kindness to your dead husbands and to me. May the Lord grant that each of you will find rest in the home of another husband” (v 8, 9).

Naomi could acknowledge her bitterness, state exactly what she felt God was “doing to her,” and in the same breath call upon the Lord to bless others.

With all that Naomi had suffered and through all the hopelessness that awaited her she still thought of others and reached out to them in love.

With all that she had suffered and through all the hopelessness that awaited her she still thought of others and reached out to them in love. She was not swallowed up in bitterness.

Regardless of how she believed God was treating her, she still prayed.

Naomi isn’t one of the biblical heroes like Abraham or Moses or King David or Peter or Paul. She is just an ordinary woman with an ordinary life doing the next best thing. She lives simply in the delicate and beautiful web of salvation that is being spun through God’s providence in all the world. Everyday decisions are used by God as, unbeknownst to her, he accomplishes the mystery of salvation, and her tender story sets the stage for events of biblical proportions.

Here’s what I learned from Naomi:

• God has a plan and nothing can stop that plan. God’s plan is much larger than our own individual lives, and yet our personal lives are of immense importance in the larger plan.
• Sometimes it is nice to do a discernment about God’s will. But most of the time, we, like Naomi, only have the possibility of doing the next right thing, the next act of love for someone else. Each of those seemingly insignificant decisions are part of the unfolding of God’s providence for the coming of the Kingdom. Our life is of immense value.
• Love is really important.
• I don’t know the plan, but God does.
• Keep praying. Keep believing. Keep talking. Keep loving.

Daily living is the theater of God’s glory. Though we don’t know the story line entirely, we do know that the Author of Salvation uses everything to bring the world to its final end, communion with God.

Naomi had no way of knowing that through all the micro-decisions of her life, the seeming failure, the bitterness and the determination, her daughter-in-law Ruth would end up being named in the genealogy of Jesus as the great-grandmother of King David (Mt. 1:5-6).

God knows what he is about and that is enough for me.