Loving like Ruth this Mother’s Day

I won’t be with my mum on Mothers’ Day, and I feel a little guilty. She knows I love her, of course, but I’m missing an opportunity to really demonstrate it.

Reading the book of Ruth recently has made me think more deeply, however, about how to be a good daughter.

Ruth wasn’t with her mum on Mothers’ Day, either. All we know about Ruth’s mum, in fact, is that Ruth left her behind. After her husband, Mahlon, died, she didn’t go back to her parents. Instead, she clung to her mother-in-law.

Naomi didn’t think this was a good idea. She had nothing to give Ruth. “Return home,” she cries in Ruth 1 v 11. “Why would you come with me?”

But Ruth insisted. “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.”

Faith before family

What Ruth was really doing was putting her faith before her family. “Your people will be my people,” she explains to Naomi, “and your God my God.” She left her own family because she trusted in the God of Israel. That’s how Boaz would describe it later in the story: “May you be richly rewarded by the Lord,” he says in 2 v 12, “under whose wings you have come to take refuge.”

Surprising as it is that Ruth chose to leave her own family behind, I like the idea of finding a surrogate mother. It seems familiar. I don’t live near my mum, and I know the value of an older woman offering a younger one her wisdom, friendship and practical help. Knowing such women gives me a vague, comforting sense of stability.

But that’s not quite what Naomi was like for Ruth. This surrogate mother wasn’t full of kindliness and good sense. She was bitter, unsettled, and unable to provide.

“The Almighty has made my life very bitter,” Naomi says, back home in Bethlehem. “I went away full, but the Lord has brought me back empty.”

Naomi was grieving. She could offer no friendly, reassuring words. No comforting sense of stability.

A different kind of daughter

As a young woman living far from my family, my instinct is to seek encouraging, wise, prayerful older women to look after me. Maybe instead, I should look out for women in my church who are like Naomi: women who feel empty and bitter. Instead of looking for a good surrogate mother, I could try to be a good surrogate daughter.

That’s what Ruth was. First she clung to Naomi; then she provided for her by working hard in the fields. And at the end of the story, in 4 v 15, the local women say that Ruth is better to Naomi than seven sons. After various twists and turns, Ruth was now newly married, and had given birth to a child who would look after Naomi in her old age.

Those twists and turns are important, of course. The Lord also provided Boaz, whose role as a redeemer is crucial to the way the plot unfolds. But Ruth is the person who links all the other characters together. She is at the centre of the way the Lord provided for Naomi.

God provided Ruth. And Naomi, who began the story deep in bitterness after the loss of two sons, ends it in a situation that is better than having seven sons.

In Luke 14 v 26, Jesus tells us to hate our mothers and fathers if we want to be his disciples. Perhaps what he means is that we need to put faith before family. Ruth could have retreated home to her mother in Moab, saying goodbye to her new faith; instead she went with Naomi, because she trusted the God of Israel. Naomi could not provide for her, but God could. And in the end he used Ruth to turn mourning into dancing.

That’s what it looked like for Ruth to put faith before family, and to take refuge in the Lord. Maybe by God’s grace it could look like that for me, too.

Dive deeper into Ruth's story in Ruth: Poverty and Plenty, part of the Good Book Guides, a series of flexible and practical books ideal for individual study or small groups.