By Gina Caswell Kelly
When we think of Mother’s Day, most people go immediately to Proverb 31. And for good reason. It is a wonderful description of a woman after God’s own heart, who puts her family first. But the mother I want to talk about today is a Hebrew woman named Naomi.
Naomi and her family lived in Bethlehem until a famine hit. Finally, her husband decided to take his family to Moab to try to find food and work there. As time went on, her husband died leaving Naomi as a widow with two sons. Both sons married Moabite women. (This was not the normal practice. Jewish men married Jewish women in those days.) Again, time goes on and both Naomi’s sons die. Poor Naomi is left with no husband, and no sons, in a foreign country with two Moabite daughters-in-law. Naomi decides to go back to Bethlehem and tells her daughters-in-law to stay in Moab with their people. One of the daughters-in-law does, but the other one, Ruth, tells Naomi she will go with her.
What Ruth says to Naomi is very telling. She says, “Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried.” What we are seeing in this is a Moabite woman who was so influenced by her One True God worshiping mother-in-law that she is willing to leave her own family and her home land and travel to a place where she would possibly be seen as a social outcast and someone without a place in society. She was even willing to leave behind all the false gods of the Moabites. She was willing to do all this because of the faithfulness of her mother-in-law Naomi.
Now, what we see of Naomi in the book of Ruth shows a woman turned a bit bitter by her losses, but the old Naomi must have been quite a woman of God. Enough so that she was a major influence on Ruth in her life. She lived a life for God even though she was in a foreign country, surrounded by idol worshipping people.
And this is what we need in our mothers. We need moms who are dedicated first and foremost to being the woman that God created them to be. We need moms who will teach us how to love this great God of ours. We need moms who go with us to church and make sure that we are learning that we are not going through this world alone.
What kind of mother (or father) are you? Are you leading your family to that eternal life giving relationship with Jesus Christ? Are you teaching your children by example just how important faith in God is? Did your mother do that for you?
Be thankful for our mothers today and everyday! They make a difference!