Ruth - Saints and Scriptures Sunday

It could be that Ruth felt the same way a lot of mothers do on some days - what I do doesn't matter-I'll never make a difference in the world. Just not true.

This was taken from the introduction to Ruth in the The Message .

The outsider Ruth was not born into the faith and felt no natural part of it-like many of us. But she came to find herself gathered into the story and given a quiet and obscure part that proved critical to the way everything turned out.

Scripture is a vast tapestry of God's creating, saving, and blessing ways of the world. The great names in the plot that climaxes at Sinai (Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses) and the great names in the sequel (Joshua, Samuel, David, Solomon) can be intimidating to the ordinary, random individuals: "Surely there is no way that I can have any significant part on such a stage." But the story of the widowed, impoverished, alien Ruth is proof to the contrary. She is the inconsequential outsider whose life turns out to be essential for telling the complete story of God's ways among us. The unassuming ending carries the punch line: "Boaz married Ruth, she had a son Obed, Obed was the father of Jesse, and Jesse the father of David."

David! In its artful telling of this "outsider" widow, uprooted and obscure, who turns out to be the great-grandmother of David and the ancestor of Jesus, the book of Ruth makes it possible for each of us to understand ourselves, however ordinary or "out of it", as irreplaceable in the full telling of God's story. We count-every last one of us-and what we do counts.

For more Saints and Scriptures Sunday, visit The Kennedy Adventures.

Happy Mother's Day!