Coming back from Florida hasn’t been a soft landing. It wasn’t a gentle glide into routine, instead it was a running leap straight back into the noise of everyday life. Work. Chores. Errands. Emails. Laundry. All of it, slapping me in the face all at once with the smell of dirty socks.
I miss the beach. I miss the waves, the easy rhythm of a town that didn’t know or care what day it was. I miss the friendly people, the kind that smile at you just because they can, not because they're rushing to their next appointment. There are friendly people here too, but something changes when you're on vacation. You're unhurried. You're not counting minutes. You're not buried in deadlines.
My sweet mom, who has quietly battled depression for so many years, said something on this trip that I’ll never forget. She looked over the water one morning and said, “This place makes me feel like I want to live again.”
I knew exactly what she meant.
It wasn’t just the beach or the sunshine. It was the freedom to breathe. To be. To feel the lightness of living without the weight of the world pressing down on your shoulders. In that sleepy little town, we weren’t just resting, we were restoring. It gave us both life. She left that place just as full as I did.
Maybe that’s why I’m already planning the next trip. It’ll be a few months from now. I’ll need to save up. I might go alone, but I don't think I'll be getting through that airport without my mother with me. It will be just us, the sound of the waves, and a quiet little dock at the edge of the world.
If there’s one theme God echoed through the sound of those waves to me, it’s this:
It’s time to let go.
Letting go of pain, yes, but also letting go of control.
Letting go of trying to hold everything and everyone in place.
My kids are getting older. They’re needing me less in some ways and differently in others. I feel the ache of that shift more than I expected. My mom is aging too. She’s changing, and so is our relationship. I’ve spent so much time holding tightly to what was. But I know God is whispering now, “It’s okay to let go.”
Let go of the past.
Let go of trying to make things stay the same.
Let go of roles that are no longer yours to carry.
This isn’t a loss, it’s transition. Transitions, though tender, are sacred ground. They are the places where God meets us with fresh grace, with new purpose, and with gentle reminders that He is not only the God of what was, He is the God of what’s next.
The truth is, you can’t move forward while clinging to the past. And God knows that I love to do some clinging like Saran Wrap.
So I’m learning to let go.
Of roles that are changing.
Of expectations that no longer fit.
Of old hurts I’ve carried too long.
Because forward is the only direction He walks.
And I want to go with Him.
Ruth’s Calling
Naomi was from Bethlehem in Judah, a place known as “the house of bread.” But when a severe famine struck the land, the irony was painful. There was no bread. No harvest. No security. So Naomi and her husband, Elimelek, left Bethlehem behind with their two sons and crossed into Moab, a foreign and often hostile land, just to survive.
There, in Moab, Ruth’s story begins.
She was a Moabite woman, and she married one of Naomi’s sons. Likely in her late teens or early twenties, Ruth expected a simple life filled with family, tradition, and the quiet rhythm of routine. But famine had already disrupted one family line, and loss was about to unravel another.
And the losses came, boy did they come, one by one.
We don’t know how or why the three men died. Scripture doesn’t tell us if they suffered from disease, starvation, or if a tragic accident struck them down together. Maybe some grief is too heavy for explanation.
What we do know is this:
In a cruel wave of loss, it was all gone.
First Naomi’s husband died.
Then both of her sons, Ruth’s and Orpah’s husbands, died too.
They had been in Moab for about ten years. Ten years of shared life. Ten years of building a future.
Ten years that Ruth surely imagined would lead to children, stability, and growing old alongside her husband.
And now, all of it was undone.
Then came word from the old country.
“Naomi heard in Moab that the Lord had come to the aid of His people by providing food for them…”
—Ruth 1:6
The famine in Bethlehem had finally lifted. The Lord had visited His people again and He was restoring the land.
So Naomi made the decision to return home. Not because she had hope, but because she had nothing left to lose. Grief pressed her forward. Hunger pulled her home. But she had no idea that God wasn’t just restoring crops in Bethlehem, He was restoring her story, too.
In that culture, widows were among the most vulnerable. A young woman with no husband and no sons had little hope for stability or security. The socially acceptable thing for Ruth to do was to return to her father’s house and hope to remarry one day. It would have been logical. Sensible. Safe.
And scripture takes us into a moment where Naomi encourages her to do just that.
The dust was swirling around their sandals as they walked the road to Bethlehem. The tears carved quiet paths down tired cheeks. Three widows standing in the middle of a road, with nothing ahead but uncertainty and nothing behind but loss.
Naomi stopped walking.
She turned to the two young women beside her, daughters by marriage, bound now by shared grief. She looked at their faces, still soft with youth, still full of potential. And maybe in that moment, she realized what she could not bear: dragging them into a future she no longer believed in.
Her voice cracked as she spoke, equal parts love and lament.
“Go back,” she said. “Turn around. Go home to your mothers. May the Lord show you the same kindness you’ve shown to me. May He grant each of you rest... in the home of another husband.”
Then she wept. Not just for what she had lost, but for them. For what they still might find if they let her go. Naomi saw nothing ahead for herself but bitterness. But she refused to let her emptiness steal their hope. Her story, she believed, was over. But theirs didn’t have to end with hers.
Orpah listened, heart torn. She cried. She clung. Finally, she kissed Naomi goodbye and turned back, back to the world she knew, the language she spoke, the life that had once been hers. Who can blame her? I probably would have done the same.
But Ruth didn’t move. She stayed rooted in the dust and heartbreak of that moment, looking at Naomi with love. Naomi tried again to urge her away, but Ruth’s spirit had already crossed a line. She was not going back.
Out of the stillness, Ruth spoke words that would change not only Naomi’s story, but her own, and eventually, the world’s:
“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.
May the Lord deal with me, be it ever so severely, if even death separates you and me.”
—Ruth 1:16–17
This wasn’t just poetic. It was a holy vow.
Ruth didn’t just cling to Naomi, she clung to God. She surrendered certainty for obedience. She let go of comfort for the sake of calling. She released the life she thought she’d have in order to walk into the one God had chosen for her.
And here’s the beautiful thing:
Ruth couldn’t have known at the time that her decision to stay would change history.
I’m sure in that moment, she simply knew she was being called to stay with Naomi. To walk with her. To trust God. But she couldn’t have imagined why.
She didn’t know she would one day glean in Boaz’s field.
She didn’t know she would marry him, bear a son, or become the great-grandmother of King David.
She didn’t know her name would be etched into the lineage of the Messiah.
She only knew that God was asking her to go, and she went. Ruth’s story is proof that God doesn’t just meet us in our surrender, He blesses it. He weaves our letting go into legacies we can’t begin to imagine.
Maybe that’s what He’s doing with me, too.
The Transformation
The old roles, the shifting relationships, the future I thought I’d have isn’t being taken from me.
It's being transformed.
Maybe the letting go is how God makes room for something eternal.
But in time, every one of those hopes was fulfilled, just not in the way she expected.
By following God’s call, Ruth stepped into a story she never could have written on her own. In Bethlehem, she met Boaz, a man of integrity and compassion, a kinsman-redeemer who not only provided for her but loved her. There’s no trace of conflict or regret in their union. Everything about their story points to quiet joy, mutual honor, and God’s blessing.
Together, they built a life.
Together, they had a child.
Together, they restored not just their future, but Naomi’s as well.
And through that child (Obed) Ruth became the great-grandmother of King David. Her obedience didn’t just rebuild her life, it helped shape the very lineage of Jesus Christ.
That’s what God does. He takes the ashes of our plans and turns them into foundations for things we can’t even see yet. Ruth’s story didn’t end with her husband’s death.
It was resurrected.
Transition is so often God’s tool for growth. It shakes us, stretches us, and sometimes breaks us, but only so He can remake us.
Life is always changing. That part isn’t optional. But how we walk through that change, that’s where trust lives. That’s where faith blooms. That’s where God meets us and whispers, “I’m doing something new.”
“See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?
I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.”
—Isaiah 43:19
And so I’m learning, day by day, to open my hands.
To let go of what was.
To trust God with what is.
And to believe, like Ruth, that even the changes I didn’t choose might be the very soil where legacy is planted.
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