Keep on Keeping on

I did a little reading today from the book of Ruth. It is such a precious book that in the flesh shows us how a woman that married a man from another country becomes a widow and leaves her own home and family to travel with her mother-in-law back to the home her family had left during the time of famine, and then finds a new love, a redeemer who took all her financial worries and loneliness away!  On that level you can read it as a beautiful love story. On a spiritual level we see an allegory of Christ and the church. We were foreigners, Gentiles, and yet Jesus as our Redeemer, called us His own and He takes us to be His very own Bride. In the story we find Ruth widowed, far away from home and living in a land where the people worship a strange God, yet she was willing to do it because of the love she had toward her mother-in-law Naomi. What I like to stress in this story, for anyone looking for a new way of life or a new love, is that Ruth was gleaning faithfully in one field, working morning to night without a break and then the Master noticed her faithfulness and ordered the other harvesters to make life a little easier on her by leaving some good stalks of barley for her to find, kind of like planting colored Easter eggs in plain sight for the little ones to find.  You might have thought, “I have done everything I was supposed to do and look what has happened to me!” Don’t you think that Ruth felt discouraged? She was young and her husband just took sick and died! Then she moved to a strange country with her mother-in-law to a town where she was probably the subject of the town gossip at the local well. Here was a girl who worshipped idols in a place where the Lord God Jehovah was worshipped. Then she was out working in the hot sun, seemingly with no reward but what little bit she could glean, things that the others had overlooked, the left overs when the Master saw her plight and came to her rescue. We are working in a field, feeling a little sorry for ourselves and we think, “nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen“, however we do have a savior a mighty redeemer and that is Jesus!
Psalm 34:5-7 Look at Him; give Him your warmest smile. Never hide your feelings from Him.  When I was desperate, I called out, and God got me out of a tight spot. God’s angel sets up a circle of protection around us while we pray.
What is the lesson here? 1. If you want to be noticed, by God or man, take my Armenian grandfather’s advice to just “keep on keeping on”, working faithfully. 2. Don’t get discouraged no matter how if everything you try seems to hard or bad 3. When your Redeemer holds out His hand, TAKE it and hold on to Him for dear life!