Recently I have been looking at the story of Ruth.
In chapter 1 the family move to Moab because of a famine in Israel.
The family settled but then Elimelech, Naomi’s husband, died.
Naomi’s sons married girls from Moab but then they also died.
Naomi decides to return home and her daughter-in-laws start back with her.
Naomi tries to persuade them to return to their families.
It was the tradition that if the husband died, the brother would marry the wife and try and grow her family for her, but there were no brothers left.
Verse 12 says, “Turn back my daughters, go for I am too old to have a husband. If I should say I have hope, if I should have a husband tonight and should also bear sons, would you wait until they were grown?”
The Hebrew for Hope is Tikvah which can be explained as a thread that leads to something better. It reminds me of a scene from the Christ Christmas film ‘Arthur Christmas’.
At the end of the film, Arthur delivers a missed present to a young girl and doesn’t just leave it at the base of the tree, he lays a ribbon from her room for her to follow to find her present.
And that is what we as believers should be doing for our communities, laying threads of love that lead people to find the hope we have found.
Naomi believed she could offer no thread of hope to her daughter-in-laws, but Ruth believed that her hope was in the God that Naomi trusted in.
And that gives each one of us, who often don’t think we have much to offer, so much encouragement, that the God we love and serve is the hope of the whole world.
So let’s get out there and lay some threads of Tikvah!
Vince Carrington