<p>Anyone who has ever lost someone dear knows that grief has a way of rewriting a person’s own story. Naomi lived this out in an extreme way: she lost her husband and both sons far from home, and returned to the city of her birth feeling that God had turned against her.</p>
<p>Her story begins with a flight. A severe famine in Bethlehem in Judah drove Naomi, her husband Elimelech, and their sons Mahlon and Chilion to the country of Moab, a neighboring and foreign land (Ruth 1:1-2).</p>
<p>In Moab, her sons married Moabite women, Ruth and Orpah. But within a few years Elimelech died, and later both sons died as well, leaving Naomi alone with her two daughters-in-law, without a husband, without sons, and without grandchildren (Ruth 1:3-5).</p>
<p>When she heard that the Lord had provided food for his people, Naomi decided to return to Bethlehem. Along the way, she urged her daughters-in-law to stay in Moab, with their own families. Orpah agreed, but Ruth refused to leave: “Your people will be my people and your God my God” (Ruth 1:16).</p>
<p>When she arrived in Bethlehem, Naomi asked to be called Mara, meaning bitter, because the Almighty had made her life bitter (Ruth 1:20). But it was there, in the city that had seen her leave empty, that she guided Ruth to approach Boaz, a relative of Elimelech, in search of the right of redemption.</p>
<p>Boaz married Ruth, and the couple’s son, Obed, was placed in Naomi’s lap by the women of the city (Ruth 4:16). The same woman who once called herself bitter became grandmother to the grandfather of King David.</p>
<p>Naomi shows that faith does not require hiding pain from God: it can be spoken in one’s own name, as bitterness. And she shows too that the end of someone’s story, even after years of loss, can still be in God’s hands.</p>
