An Unexpected Love Story

Mother-in-law.  The words are enough to send chills up spines and cause many to tell harrowing stories.  Is there ever a story to be told about mother-in-laws, but it’s not what we’d expect. 

In an incomprehensible act of events, Ruth leaves her family, homeland, gods, customs and traditions to follow her deceased husband’s mother, Naomi.  She heeds Naomi’s advice on several occasions, including one that might have sounded as foreign to Ruth as it does to me: she uncovered a sleeping man’s feet and laid down by them in a marriage proposition of sorts (Ruth 3).  For as unusual as the customs might have seemed to Ruth, there was one thing that was not strange in that foreign land: love.  Evidences of it poured out between Ruth and Naomi.  Their beautiful love story reminds us that love has no bounds.  God crafted our hearts in such a way as to allow this incredible affection to extend beyond family lines or romantic relationships.

Some of you, like Naomi in her younger days, devote the majority of your time caring, loving and providing for your children.  Others, like the older Naomi, display the same level of concern and compassion to those they didn’t birth.  I want to say Happy Mother’s Day to moms, women who replace their empty crib by “adopting” countless children through volunteer work, those who raise foster children, and all women who play a pivotal role in a child’s well being. 

And whoever welcomes a little child like this in my name welcomes me.”  Matthew 18:5

Happy Mother’s Day.