The Greatest Gift: Unwrapping the Full Love Story of Christmas by Ann Voskamp Read Free Book Online

said to her, “your sister-in-law has gone back to her people and to her gods. You should do the same.”
    But Ruth replied, “Don’t ask me to leave you and turn back. Wherever you go, I will go; wherever you live, I will live. Your people will be my people, and your God will be my God. Wherever you die, I will die, and there I will be buried. May the LORD punish me severely if I allow anything but death to separate us!”
    RUTH 1:1-17
    There are Advent moments when you’d like nothing more than to order a Christmas miracle.
    The one you need when it feels like no one really sees you. No one sees how alone you really feel. How overwhelmed by the work and unappreciated by the people. No one sees that you just want someone to cup your face and look into your eyes and say your name from somewhere deep inside, like a calling home, like a belonging —like a holding that has you around all the fragile places and won’t leave you.
    Some seasons are Naomi times. You ventured out with those hopes, full —and you feel you’ve been brought back empty . . . disillusioned, withered dry.
    In some seasons, for all their gloss and glitz, it can be achingly hard to find gifts, and days can feel like fists.
    Naomi —she goes home bitter. Orpah goes home to begin over. And Ruth goes on believing she will find home. Maybe sometimes the miracle begins by growing not in bitterness but in faithfulness —because, for all its supposed sophistication, cynicism is simplistic. In a fallen world, how profound is it to see the cracks? The radicals and the reflective, the Ruths and the revolutionaries —they are the ones on the road, in the fields, on the wall, pointing to the dawn of the new Kingdom coming, pointing to the light that breaks through all things broken, pointing to redemptionalways rising and the Advent coming again. Brilliant people don’t deny the dark; they are the ones who never stop looking for His light in everything.
    Ruth, who had given up her freedom for Naomi’s future, who had gone with her back to that little town of Bethlehem —the outsider grafted in —she looks for His light, and she sees it: “Love is the face at the center of our universe. A sacred Smile; Holiness ready to die for intimacy.” [14] But this can come too: expectations can come steal the gifts. Naomi, who has been given the gift of Ruth’s sacrifice, sympathy, service —she’s struggling to see it, to see the gift of the love still all around her. With her Ruth right there, clinging to her, she grieves: “I went away full, but the LORD has brought me home empty.” It happens. When we have an agenda for God, we can’t see the gifts from God.
    There are no brazen miracles to be seen in the entire book of Ruth.
    No angels appear stage left, no visions shatter the night, no heavenly hosts are overhead.
    Much like the corner of Wallace and Main in the middle of December. Or like the annual family gathering at Aunt Muriel’s with the embattled in-laws, the opinionated out-laws, the disinterested in-betweens. Or like your living room, your calendar, your day planner —all the mundane middlethat just keeps pressing you in, stretching you out, deadening you slowly numb.
    You know, like how Ruth just happens to end up in Bethlehem. Happens to end up gleaning in the field of about the only man who could be their kinsman-redeemer, Boaz —about the only one who has the right to buy back their lost ancestral land. Who just happens to meet her, hear her story, feel moved to offer to help. And she just happens to find him sleeping, follows her mother-in-law’s instructions to ask him to spread his cloak over her —literally to “spread your wing over me,” to save her from being preyed upon.
    In Hebrew culture, she just proposed, asked him to take her —to marry her. She just said, “I want you to be my redeemer.” And he just happens to say yes. And buys back the family land and redeems her and takes her and marries her, and