March 22 Choosing at the Crossroads

Ruth 1:6 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."

Yesterday I heard of a student who just got engaged, an event to celebrate, had she gotten engaged to a man who shared what she has said is her faith. But he is not; as far as we know, he is of another major faith though he does not practice it, or so he says. Someone asked her about how their children will be raised because his church requires the children of its adherents be raised in that faith. Her, to me naive, answer was, "I will face that when we come to it."

She thinks she has won; a man has put a ring on her finger indicating he chose her, but has he? Or do either one of them really know who they have pledged themselves to? Is she hoping she can change him, or is he hoping he can change her? Either way, someone is going to have to give up something, and at what cost? Is she aware that she has said, "Where you go, I and my children will go?"

Certainly she has just made one of those choices, at what Smith refers to as a critical juncture of her life. Smith says "the only real issue is whether we decide to go with God." I cannot help but wonder how much consultation she did with God and whether she even fools herself about who influenced her to go that way.

Then I wonder about the choices we make at critical junctures in our lives, junctures we don't even recognize as critical. We only make them because they are in front of us to be made. Perhaps it's a job, and we base our decision on how much money we might make or how it will affect our career. Perhaps it's a date or a future mate, and we base that decision on how lonely we are at a given moment or how much peer or parental pressure we might feel. Perhaps it is as simple as how and with whom we spend our leisure time, giving significant entree into our lives influences who do not love God.

One of the first things I thought of when I read this passage was the words of Psalm 1:1, "Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful." 

Ruth walked away from those influences, braving the unknown people of her mother-in-law because of the known God. Imagine the courage it took her, to walk away from her family to go alone (yes, her mother-in-law was there, but she had her own issues) into a new country to a people who called hers pagan. Because she had met God; it could be for no other reason.

I want to be always marked with the courage of a Ruth and the relationship with God Ruth must have had to make such a life-changing decision.