Redemptive Ramblings

I am a self-proclaimed adventurer. As an Enneagram 7, I thrive on novelty and experiences. Boredom is actually frightening and a little painful. Unsurprisingly, then, I love stories of people who live extraordinary lives for God: Esther, who became queen; Sampson, who saved Israel; David, the shepherd king; and Paul, spending his life fighting opposition to spread the Gospel throughout the world. These stories match my concept of what it looks like to live a meaningful life. I love the idea of seeing and knowing the difference my life makes, being all in for Jesus in a way that is passionate and obvious. 

But the truth about a life like that is I don’t just want it for Jesus. I also want it for myself. I love the idea of a visibly meaningful life, of a globetrotting, adventurous Jesus journey. But what if that’s not the story God writes for me? Can I sit in the mundane when the story He writes is a quiet one, where the main character truly is Jesus instead of me? This is when 1 Corinthians 1:27-29 hits close to home: “Isn’t it obvious that God deliberately chose men and women that the culture overlooks and exploits and abuses, chose these ‘nobodies’ to expose the hollow pretensions of the ‘somebodies’? That makes it quite clear that none of you can get by with blowing your own horn before God.” (MSG)

That’s the inspiration behind this series. It’s a series about those whose lives looked quiet and maybe even small, but mattered eternally in a way they never anticipated. It’s a series of lives that aren’t full of adventure, but they followed God and made an immense impact. 

The first life I want to explore is Boaz. We don’t get a lot of details on his early life, or really even on his later life. He is a side character in the Book of Ruth, yet he is presented as foreshadowing Christ as the kinsman-redeemer. When Boaz shows up at the beginning of chapter 2, all we know about him is that he’s a wealthy relative of Ruth’s late father-in-law, Elimelech. We can only guess how he made it through the drought and ensuing famine, but it appears that he stuck it out in Bethlehem. Elimelech had taken his family away to Moab, where the drought was not as severe. Scholars have long interpreted Elimelech’s choice as a lack of faith in God and His promised provision for Israel. It’s a safe bet, then, to interpret Boaz’s decision to stay as faith in contrast with Elimelech’s doubt. 

This was all happening during the time of the Judges, likely when Eli was the high priest and judge of Israel at Shiloh. The time of the judges was a dark time for Israel, and faithfulness to God was the exception, rather than the norm. Judges 17:6 and 21:25 both have this to say: “Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” A sad indictment of a people who were meant to belong to the Lord! It’s also a familiar idea for anyone in Western Culture right now, when ideas like “you do you” and “whatever makes you happy” have seeped even into church culture, a modern variant of the idea of everyone doing right in their own eyes.

Into this mess steps Boaz. His first stated words are a greeting in the name of the Lord (Ruth 2:4). He shows his faithfulness to God throughout the story. Allowing gleaners in his field was following Mosaic law, and a practice that we can assume not all landowners kept in a time when everyone was doing whatever felt right to them. Stories even exist of landowners who sent their own slaves as “gleaners” in their fields. That way, they were fulfilling the legal requirement to allow gleaning while still keeping all the grain for their household. Boaz, however, continued to allow gleaners in his fields and to treat them generously. He showed generosity to Ruth long before he had any thought of marrying her. 

As a God-honoring landowner, Boaz’s life would have been punctuated by regular trips to the tabernacle for sacrifices, and it would have followed the recurrent nature of the agricultural calendar. Neither of these rhythms is exciting or adventurous. We know he wasn’t a young man because he commends Ruth for her family loyalty when she asks him to be her kinsman-redeemer (Ruth 3:10). He has just lived his life in a steady, faithful fashion.

Boaz was calm, steady, predictable, and unexciting. He was, in fact, everything I’ve never wanted to be. But in fulfilling the role of kinsman redeemer for Ruth and Naomi, he becomes an important figure in the Biblical narrative. Not only is he one of the clearest Old Testament pictures of Christ, but he also became one of Jesus’ biological ancestors. After Boaz and Ruth married, they had Obed. Obed was the father of King David, from whose line came Jesus. 

God gives monumental significance to a life that looks like nothing special from the outside. Romans says it like this: “So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering” (12:1 MSG). It doesn’t have to look like we are doing big things for God to be doing big things in and through us! 

This is a phenomenal reminder for me, and I hope it resonates for you as well. Our daily life, the everyday things, rhythms that grow repetitive to the point of feeling redundant, these are things God uses for His glory, too. Let’s face the mundane with a sense of awe that even in those moments, God is at work doing something bigger than we can see or imagine.