Commitment In Relationships: A Lesson From Ruth

There once was a woman named Ruth, and she was a Moabite.  That is, she was from a mountainous strip of land in Jordan, then called “Moab.”  She can teach us a great deal about real, muscular commitment to relationships.

The Ruth of the Hebrew Scriptures made a commitment to Naomi, her mother-in-law, when her mother-in-law returned home to Bethlehem and Ruth committed to go with her.  You might actually know some of her words.  You hear them often romanticized at weddings.  Here is Ruth, a young, newly widowed girl, and she says this:

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 the LORD deal with me, be it ever so severely, if anything but death separates you and me.

These words have been so sentimentalized in weddings that we can hardly understand the heart of what they’re saying.  Ruth is not speaking to some handsome man at the head of an aisle. It’s not some bright June afternoon in a little white church in the middle of a field of wild flowers, her smiling up at him in his crisp tuxedo, with the smell of cologne filling the space between them. There’s no aisle carpeted with roses.  There are no candles here.

Ruth is speaking to her mother in law!  Naomi is this old, wrinkled, wizened-up lady and Ruth is standing on a dusty road at the beginning of a long journey of more dusty roads. She’s got everything she owns stuffed in two plastic bags from Kroger.  She’s at the start of a bleak and unpromising walk into a future that’s full of uncertainty, heading to a place where she will be ridiculed and marginalized and rejected and gossiped about because of her culture (the Jews hated the Moabites).  My former pastor, Steve Elliott sums up Ruth’s words of commitment like this:

• I will go with you to a land where I will be despised for who I am.
• I will forsake all of my upbringing and all the values associated with my culture and I will embrace yours even though I know it will cost me more than I recognize.
• I will embrace a people and a language and a culture that may never embrace me.
• I will live as a widow forever and I will die in a land that will never honor my life and I’ll be buried there as an alien.
• And I will walk into tomorrow with both eyes open, knowing that a relational famine of untold proportions waits for me there.
• And when the well is dry and the crops are not good, when Bethlehem – the city of bread – becomes the city of hungering and waiting on God. When I look across my pillow at only another empty pillow, when my contentment has fled, when my joy has vanished, I will never forsake you.

This kind of commitment to relationships is missing in our present day culture.  Despite the words may use, we tend to commit so much less of ourselves to our relationships, and we tend to give up on them much sooner.  The demise of authentic community is a predictable outcome.  As a pastor and a follower of Jesus, I lament the surface-level commitment we give today to lasting community.  We pay lip-service to a lasting obligation to others, but when squeezed by life’s pressures, we “take our ball and go home.”

The lesson of Ruth is that relationships (friendships, marriages, churches, teams) require a big decision – a “line in the sand” moment that sets the course for the future.  Of course, there will need to be many little decisions along the way that support the big decision; but it must start there.

Here’s to big decisions and muscular commitment and relational health!