From Fullness to Fullness

Years back a woman named Naomi went through deep frustration and pain. Death of dear ones tore her apart. Emptiness and boredom set in her life. Life tasted bitter all of a sudden. "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." (Ruth 1:20-21). Naomi means pleasant one. She renamed her Mara, meaning bitterness. Death of the dearest men (her husband and her two sons) in her life, for sure took a toll on her attitude to life. While losing dear ones made a negative impact in her life, the good thing in her was that she started to work on the one positive aspect of her life. She worked on the one leftover, living person in her life, Ruth, her daughter-in-law (the other one walked away) who was a symbol of true faith and love.

Can anything good come out of two widows, one an elderly woman and another one, in the prime of her youth? Why not? God operates through instruments, most often, humans and through divine leading, to bring hope in times of frustrations and disaster. The last three chapters of the Book of Ruth in the Bible tells us how Naomi worked on creating a new life for Ruth using her Yahwistic cultural practices and how the foreigner to a new faith, Ruth, obeyed her mother-in-law’s counsels. Yet nothing would have worked, but for Boaz, a man who basically respected a foreign woman who by then has started to work in his farm.

The climax of the story is that Naomi’s story ended in fullness. She went to Moab holding hands with three men in her life, her husband and their two sons. Her story ends in the last chapter, she being surrounded by another set of three persons, all of them newly added in her life, Ruth, her second husband, Boaz and their son Obed. King David and the King of kings, Jesus were born in this family line. No wonder, it is a story of fullness to fullness.

The women said to Naomi: "Praise be to the LORD, who this day has not left you without a kinsman-redeemer. May he become famous throughout Israel! He will renew your life and sustain you in your old age. For your daughter-in-law, who loves you and who is better to you than seven sons, has given him birth." Then Naomi took the child, laid him in her lap and cared for him. The women living there said, "Naomi has a son." And they named him Obed. He was the father of Jesse, the father of David (Ruth 4: 14-17).

Here are few lessons from Naomi’s life for us to be used as instruments of fullness in the hands of God:
1. Work on the positives in life.
2. Use God-given wisdom to grab opportunities, like how it came to Naomi in the form of local culture. Be sensitive to God’s leading.

3. In families, we need to raise not only girls who are always taught to obey, but also raise Boazes who would respect women and redeem battered women. Most frustrations in families and societies have a possible solution when we properly raise boys and girls in our homes, while they are very young!

Let us be assured of the fullness which Christ has promised his followers to grip us in the agonising situations of our life. Jesus said: The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full (John 10:10). He always leads us from fullness to fullness!