“Don’t plead with me to abandon you or to return and not follow you. For wherever you go, I will go, and wherever you live, I will live; your people will be my people, and your God will be my God” (Ruth 1:16).
A few months after I moved to Illinois, I was assigned to write about a group of leaders in Chicagoland who were reaching very hard-to-reach people. They had facilitated new churches that worshipped in several different languages and were doing the hard, sacrificial work of consistently sharing Jesus with people who didn’t know him yet.
And it was working.
People who had never come to church were coming to church every week. People were coming to know Jesus as Savior.
Simple questions
As a journalist, I should have had a better question to ask than the very simple one I came up with: How? How, with all these logistics to manage on a weekly basis, is this working so well?
One leader’s answer has stuck with me for 15 years: We just try to keep an open-handed perspective, he said. We’re holding all of this very loosely.
It was an eloquently simple way to explain a much more complex concept: they were relying on the Lord to provide what they needed.
In feast or famine, they understood He was the one doing the work. Any success they saw was because of His provision.
When I read the brief account of Ruth in the Old Testament, I can almost imagine her standing with similarly open hands in front of her mother-in-law, Naomi. Unlike those Chicago church planters, she was in a season of grief and not of prospering. But like them, her attitude was still one of surrender.
This life is yours, Lord. My future is completely, totally wrapped up in what you have for me to do and where you would have me go.
Complete surrender
Living with a loose grip on what we have seems even harder to do in Ruth’s position. She had lost so much. And yet still, God’s Word gives us such an inspiring example of complete surrender.
In just a few more chapters, we also get to see how he blessed her open-handed approach.
Her story — her open-handed life — is redeemed through God’s provision. Ultimately, ours will be too. In the meantime, Ruth’s story is an encouragement to live with a loose grip. This life is yours, Lord.
EDITOR’S NOTE — This story was written by Meredith Flynn and originally published by the Illinois Baptist, newsjournal of the Illinois Baptist State Association. Flynn is a wife, mother of two, and writer living in Springfield. She and her family are active members of Delta Church.
