The Monologue from Ruth

The Monologue from Ruth

written by Griff Martin

delivered by Elspeth Silva

December 17, 2017

Everyone thinks of my story as “happily ever after”…. I fear it’s the type of story folks will someday look at as love story, as if I had time for such silliness. Which is not to say that I don’t love my Boaz, I do and he is a good man, but my story is about so much more than just the man I married. 

I think my story is one of faith, of trust, it is not just a love story.

Sure it started out as one…. My first husband and his entire family moving to Moab to start a new life together. We had visions of green pastures, flocks of sheep, babies running around, It was going to be a commune of sorts, the perfect place to raise children. It was going to be a better life, a dream life, until the nightmare started.

And then all the men died. First my father in law, then my brother in law, then finally my own husband. We had nothing but grief. Three grieving widows, a trinity of sorts.

Naomi, my mother in law, she was a good woman, a just woman and she told me I could return home. She told Orpah the same thing. Orpah did, she went home. I couldn’t. 

It wasn’t that I would not be welcome at home, I think I would have. But I knew home and I knew the life that was destined for me there. I knew the end of that story, I knew how things would go. I would return home and either care for my parents or be married off once again. 

I could not go home once I had seen the more of this new world where we lived.

And I looked at Naomi and I could not leave her. It was not entirely that selfless. I was concerned about her future as well and God knows I did not want to leave her to have to make her own way, but it was more than that, she represented a future that I believed in. She represented a family that was willing to pack up and leave and try new things, she represented a dream that I still wanted, somehow she was hope. 

So without thing, I clung to her…. Or maybe it’s better to say I clung to a dream. 

And I promised her and I promised the dream that I would not leave: “Do not press me to leave you, or to turn back from following you! Where you go, I will go. Where you lodge, I will lodge, your people shall be my people, and your God shall be my God! Where you die, I will die- there will I be buried. May the Lord do thus and so to me and more al well, if even death parts me from you.”

You see one you’ve seen a dream, once you’ve seen a better way, once you’ve seen more… surely it’s impossible to go back to the way things have always been.

And in a world where I already knew exactly how things would be, in a world where I was already assigned a role and a place and a story, in a world where there was a limit to what a woman could be… In that world I saw a dream of more, a dream that sang out that more was possible and in response my heart cried out… Me too, me too.