January: New Beginnings
Day 13 — 13 January
Choosing Forward
Scripture: “But Ruth said, ‘Do not urge me to leave you or to return from following you. For where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there will I be buried. May the LORD do so to me and more also if anything but death parts me from you.‘” — Ruth 1:16–17 (ESV)
Short Teaching
I will be honest with you. I nearly chose a different passage for today. Something from one of Paul’s letters, maybe, or another section of the Psalms. Something with a Greek word I could break open and lay out for you in pieces. Something more obviously theological. But I kept coming back to this woman standing on a road between two countries, with nothing in her hands and everything behind her, making a decision that by any reasonable measure made no sense at all. And I thought: that is the kind of new beginning most people actually face. Not the kind with trumpets and clarity and a detailed plan. The kind where you are standing at a fork in the road with every sensible reason to turn back, and you choose forward anyway.
Ruth was a Moabite. That single fact would have carried enormous weight for the original readers of this story, and we miss it entirely if we do not pause to understand why. Moab and Israel had a complicated, often hostile history. The Moabites were descendants of Lot (Genesis 19:37), and the relationship between the two nations was marked by tension, suspicion, and at times open conflict. Deuteronomy 23:3 explicitly states that no Moabite shall enter the assembly of the LORD, “even to the tenth generation.” To an Israelite ear, “Ruth the Moabite” was not a neutral description. It was a label that placed her firmly outside the community of God’s people. She was foreign in the fullest sense: ethnically, religiously, and socially.
She had married into an Israelite family that had migrated to Moab during a famine. Her father-in-law, Elimelech, had died. Her husband, Mahlon, had died. Her brother-in-law, Chilion, had also died. Three men gone. And Naomi, her mother-in-law, left with nothing but grief and two Moabite daughters-in-law in a foreign country, decided to go home to Bethlehem. She told both young women to go back to their own families. Orpah, the other daughter-in-law, wept and eventually did. It was the reasonable thing to do. She had a family in Moab. She had a culture that would receive her. She had the possibility of remarriage, stability, a future that made practical sense. Orpah’s decision was not cowardice. It was common sense.
Ruth’s decision was something else entirely.
“Do not urge me to leave you or to return from following you.”
Think about what Ruth was walking away from. She was leaving her homeland, her language, her gods, her social network, her marriageability, her economic security, and every structure of belonging she had ever known. She was walking toward a country that regarded her people with suspicion, a culture whose laws explicitly excluded her kind, a mother-in-law who had nothing to offer her except companionship in poverty, and a future with no guarantees whatsoever. She had no job waiting. No family connections. No dowry. No legal standing. No plan beyond the next step.
And she did not hesitate.
“For where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God my God.”
If you have ever moved to a city where you knew nobody, you have tasted a fraction of what Ruth was choosing. The disorientation of walking streets where no one recognises your face. The exhaustion of navigating systems you do not understand in a culture that was not built for you. The loneliness of sitting in a room at the end of the day with no one to call who shares your frame of reference. And beneath all of that, the low, persistent hum of doubt: did I make the right choice? Should I have stayed where I was? Would it have been wiser to take the safe road, the known road, the road that at least had a familiar destination at the end of it?
Ruth heard all of that, I am certain. She was not stupid. She was a woman who understood exactly what she was giving up and exactly how little she was guaranteed in return. And she chose forward.
The question that matters is: why? What did Ruth see that Orpah did not? What made her walk toward a future that offered nothing tangible while Orpah, sensibly and understandably, walked back toward a future that did?
Here is what I think, and I want to be careful because the text does not spell this out in neat doctrinal language. Ruth had lived alongside Naomi’s family for approximately ten years (Ruth 1:4). She had watched how they lived. She had observed whatever it was about their relationship with their God that distinguished them from the Moabite families she had grown up in. And something in what she observed, something she could not fully articulate but could no longer deny, had taken hold of her so deeply that walking away from it was more frightening than walking toward an unknown country with empty hands.
“Your God my God.”
That is not a theological statement made in a classroom. That is a woman standing on a dusty road making a decision with her feet. She did not say, “I have studied the comparative merits of Yahweh worship and Moabite religion and have concluded that the former is doctrinally superior.” She said, “Your God, my God.” Four words. The shortest creed in Scripture. And she said them not because she understood everything about this God but because she had seen enough in the lives of the people who belonged to Him to know that whatever this was, it was more real than anything she was leaving behind.
This is how most genuine new beginnings work. Not with comprehensive understanding. Not with a fully mapped route. Not with certainty about what lies ahead. But with a recognition, sometimes barely articulable, that what you have glimpsed is worth more than what you are leaving, and a decision to move toward it even though you cannot see the destination.
And here is the part of the story that most people know but rarely connect to what Ruth did on that road. Ruth arrived in Bethlehem destitute. She gleaned in the fields behind the reapers, the ancient equivalent of collecting scraps. She was a foreign widow doing the work of the poorest of the poor in a country that had no obligation to welcome her. And yet, through a sequence of events she could never have engineered or predicted, she met Boaz, a relative of her dead husband’s family, who became her kinsman-redeemer. She married Boaz. She bore a son named Obed. Obed became the father of Jesse. Jesse became the father of David. And from the line of David, generations later, came Jesus of Nazareth.
Read that again slowly, because the scale of it is staggering. A Moabite woman, from a people explicitly excluded from the assembly of the LORD, stands on a road with nothing in her hands and chooses forward into the unknown. And that choice, that single, terrifying, irrational, faith-saturated decision, places her directly in the genealogy of the Messiah. Matthew 1:5 names her explicitly: “Boaz the father of Obed by Ruth.” She is one of only five women mentioned in Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus. A foreign widow gleaning scraps in a field she did not own became an ancestor of the Christ.
Now, let me be very precise about what I am not saying. I am not saying God looked at Ruth’s brave decision and decided to reward her by placing her in the Messiah’s lineage. That framing would suggest God’s purposes were reactive, that He observed Ruth’s faithfulness and then, in response, invented a plan to honour her. But God’s purposes do not originate in response to human action. The lineage through which the Messiah would come was not devised on the day Ruth chose to follow Naomi. God’s design, His restorative purpose for all humanity, had been in motion since before the foundation of the world. It had always included the nations, always extended beyond Israel’s borders, always encompassed people whom Israel’s own laws seemed to exclude. Ruth did not cause God to expand His plan. Ruth walked into a plan that was already expanded, already universal, already encompassing her before she took her first step on that road.
And this is what makes her story so astonishing and so relevant to wherever you are standing today. Ruth did not know any of this. She did not know she was stepping into a purpose that would echo across millennia. She did not know that the road she was choosing would lead to Bethlehem, to Boaz, to a son, to a dynasty, to a Saviour. She knew nothing except that what she had seen in Naomi’s God was worth leaving everything else behind for. She made her decision on the basis of recognition, not information. She chose forward, not because she could see the end, but because she could see enough.
That is what faith looks like in its most raw, undecorated form. Not a theological system. Not a set of doctrinal convictions arrived at through careful study, though those have their place. Faith, at its core, is what Ruth did on that road: recognising that the reality you have glimpsed is larger than the certainty you are leaving, and putting your feet on the road toward it.
And the God she walked toward? He was not waiting for her in Bethlehem as though He had been absent from Moab. He was already fully present in both countries, on both sides of the border, at every point along the road. He did not relocate to meet her. She repositioned toward Him, and in that repositioning, she stepped into a current of purpose that had been flowing long before she was born and would continue flowing long after she was gone.
If you are thirteen days into a new year and you are facing a choice that terrifies you, if you are standing at a fork where the safe road beckons and the unknown road calls, if you have glimpsed something you cannot fully explain but cannot walk away from, then Ruth’s story is your story. You do not need to see the end. Ruth did not. You do not need to understand the full scope of what you are stepping into. Ruth could not. You do not need a guarantee that the road ahead will be comfortable or that the destination will look the way you pictured it. Ruth had neither.
You need only what Ruth had: the recognition that what you have seen is real, and the willingness to choose forward.
The road is not mapped. The future is not guaranteed. But the God whose purposes you are walking into has been present at every mile of that road since before it was laid, and His design for your life, which encompasses more than you can currently see, has not been altered by a single degree.
Four words were enough for Ruth. Your people, my people. Your God, my God.
They are enough for you too.
Declaration
Every road I have ever taken that mattered began with less certainty than I wanted and more at stake than I was comfortable with. Every genuine turning point in my life arrived not with a detailed briefing but with a recognition I could not shake and a step I could not fully justify to anyone watching from the outside. And this is no different. I stand today where Ruth stood: on a road between what I know and what I have only glimpsed, with every reasonable argument urging me to turn back and a quiet, persistent certainty whispering that what lies ahead is worth more than what I am leaving behind. I do not need to see the end of this road. I have seen enough. I have seen that the God whose purposes were in motion before I arrived on this earth has not paused those purposes while I deliberated. I have seen that His design extends further than my plans ever could, into territories I would never have chosen and among people I would never have anticipated. I have seen that He does not wait at destinations; He fills every mile of every road, and there has never been a single stretch of ground where He was not already present. So I choose forward. Not because I am brave, but because what I have recognised will not let me turn around. Not because I understand where this leads, but because the One whose character holds the road has never once led anyone onto ground that could not bear their weight. Ruth walked into a purpose she could not see, and it held her. It held her son. It held generations she never met. The same God holds this road. And today, with open hands and a heart full of hesed (חֶסֶד, the same loyal, steadfast love that held Ruth all the way from Moab to Bethlehem to the genealogy of the King), I set my feet on the path I have been given, and I choose forward.
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