The Magnifying Glass

             So the two women went on until they came to Bethlehem. When they arrived in Bethlehem, the whole town was stirred because of them, and the women exclaimed, “Can this be Naomi?”

“Don’t call me Naomi,” she told them. “Call me Mara, because the Almighty has made my life very bitter. I went away full, but the Lord has brought me back empty. Why call me Naomi? The Lord has afflicted me; the Almighty has brought misfortune upon me.”

So Naomi returned from Moab accompanied by Ruth the Moabite, her daughter-in-law, arriving in Bethlehem as the barley harvest was beginning. (Ruth 1:19-22)

            Job and Naomi both demonstrate a human tendency that goes back to Adam and Eve. When life gets painful, we blame someone else – often God. She tells her friends to call her not Naomi (meaning pleasant) but Mara (meaning bitter) because the Almighty…the Lord…the Lord… and the Almighty.

There’s another human tendency that the victims of life and those who watch them tend to demonstrate. It’s what Job’s friends (and possibly Naomi’s, but we’re not told) did. “I must have done something bad to deserve all this pain. What’s wrong with me?”

In both cases, we tend to pull out our magnifying glasses and examine our lives like Sherlock Holmes, trying to use deductive reasoning to unravel the mystery of our misery. But – spoiler alert – that the rest of the story shows us is that Naomi’s misfortune was the source of great blessing for her, and for everyone else.  Because her family went to Moab, they met Ruth. Because Ruth’s husband died, Ruth returned to Israel with Naomi.

Once in Israel, Ruth meets Boaz, who happens to be a kinsman-redeemer for Naomi’s family, meaning that he is closely related enough that he can take on the role of Ruth’s dead husband, keeping his name “alive” in Israel as well as paying Naomi’s debts. He’s probably one of the few men in Israel who would be willing to marry a Moabite, because his mother was a Jerichoite named Rahab. Yes, that Rahab. When I get to heaven, I’d like to sit at the fireside and listen to sweet Naomi and possibly salty Rahab talk.

Getting back to the issue at hand, if Naomi and her family had not done as they did, God could have used someone other than Ruth as an ancestor to Jesus, or He might have gotten Ruth there another way. The point is that what Naomi saw as God finding fault with her was the very means He  used in order to bless her and the rest of us. She couldn’t have known this at the time, especially while wearing her deerstalker hat and peering through her magnifying glass. Instead, she would have needed to use H.G. Well’s time machine, or Galadriel’s fountain to see into the distant future. Or, we need to look at Romans 8:28, where we’re promised that all things work together for good. It’s hard to listen to someone remind us of Romans 8:28, but Scripture makes it clear that we should at least consider it a possibility that the magnifying glass isn’t the best tool with which to examine our current circumstances.