Naomi and her husband Elimelech had made a wrong move to go to Moab. They ought never to have been there. A bad choice was followed in the next few years by the sad deaths of her husband and children. Many of us have made bad decisions maybe changing jobs and realising with hindsight that the ‘grass was not greener’ elsewhere; or maybe work decisions that had negative lasting consequences.
Each of us by virtue of our fallibility and humanity will look back and see things that now we would have done differently. The new element in this story is found in Ruth 1:6. When she heard in Moab that the Lord had come to the aid of His people by providing food for them Naomi and her daughters-in-law prepared to return home from there.
It appeared on the surface to be the easiest choice to make –serious shortages of food in the land where she sought temporary support as a refugee, plenty of food back home – I’ve got to go home. However, to go home meant admitting that they ought not to have gone to Moab in the first place. It was an issue of pride. All of us at times say or do wrong things but to apologise and admit we made a mistake is hard.
For others of us letting the past go with respect to our failures or those of other people is the problem. At the heart of our faith is grace –that is the recognition that we have received the undeserved love of love and if God treats me better than I deserve then I ought to reflect that in my own conduct and relationships.
We need, though, to take a step back and admit that the famine was real. In the days when the judges ruled, there was a famine in the land (Ruth 1:1). It was a time of real hardship and suffering for all the people who lived in that area regardless of their ethnicity, social class or any other key feature of their identity. This could not be wished away, even prayed away because God had permitted this tough time to happen in the land.
The issue to face is simply this: How should I respond to the crisis situation before me? These events don’t affect people equally. Those individuals with a previously higher income had the ability to make choices not open to the poorest families in the land. In our country we have been living with the Covid-19 virus pandemic. It has had a huge impact on all of our lives.
However, we do have a choice in how we respond to it. If one crisis was not enough to handle in 2020, a second burst into our consciousness through the brutal killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Once again we including Mr Floyd could never have imagined what happened on that fateful day. These events could not be airbrushed from our collective history.
The question to face is simply this: How will I react to the situation before me. In the Covid-19 virus pandemic so many people in our communities stepped up to offer to help their neighbours or other people in need. The virus and the lock down are very real, but how we seek to respond to it is what will have the biggest impact on our own lives and those of others around us. Now the second crisis is much harder to deal with because institutionalised racism has been around for a long time. What will define us individually and collectively is how we respond to this situation.
We all have made mistakes in the past in the choices we made. However, are we willing to ask: ‘Lord is there something I have been missing? Help me to see with Your eyes what needs to be done, even today. Past failure is never final while we have breath left in our bodies. Both as individuals and as a society we have opportunities to make some changes for the better. We need to ask: ‘Lord show us the way’, for Jesus’s sake Amen.
Our song for reflection today is: ‘Breathe on me breath of God’
Brian Talbot