Ruth’s Amazing Story Of God’s Faithfulness, Fabric Collage Book, Marcia Carole
Today, I’ll check in at my doctor’s office, sit in the waiting room with my fellow cancer patients, maybe get a blood draw (let’s hope not) and sit with my doctor to go over the CT scan results. These sorts of days usually get me down a little, but it’s part of the cancer territory. Talking about cancer is sort of a downer. I know I am in good company with my fellow warriors who are bravely fighting as well as I. And it sure helps to have family and friends cheering me on.
God calls us to trust Him, even when some of the big pieces of the puzzle are missing. However, cancer patients are human, and we anguish over stuff from time to time. Is that pain in my abdomen, cancer… spreading? I felt fine yesterday; what is going on? Oh, wait, I was working in the garden and probably strained some muscles…..and so it goes. Trust Me, He whispers.
Studying the book of Ruth has been helpful while I wait for my test results. Ruth was one gutsy woman. She left her homeland with a fellow widow without any prospects, money, future, status or position – save her new relationship with the LIVING God. Well, hey, that made all the difference in the world – on her outlook, her service, her ingenuity, her courage, her self-sacrifice, her life work and her love life. Additionally, she didn’t have a big fan club cheering her on, yet she tenaciously held onto God and her fellow widow, Naomi.
(Eventually, she had the whole town cheering her on; her character so exemplified her trust in the one true God.)
Of course, when she left her homeland with her new love relationship with the LIVING God, she did not know how things would turn out. She just trusted God, even trusting God, in a way, for Naomi. I, too, don’t know how things will turn out, but I want to be a Ruth, and just trust God.
But Ruth replied, “Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May theLord deal with me, be it ever so severely, if even death separates you and me.” When Naomi realized that Ruth was determined to go with her, she stopped urging her. – Book of Ruth, chapter 1
“There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.” ~ Anais Nin
