Where You Go I Will Go

A new year always bring new challenges, opportunities and new goals. Maybe you sat down like we did and made out a list of new year goals and what your priorities should be. We are almost through day 1 of living our goals - we waited till Monday so we could enjoy all the bad food and not working out over the weekend. We made goals out for Faith, Finances, Friends, Family, Personal, Professional and Physical - drawing on verses from Proverbs that the pastor in Church two weekends ago went over.

Yesterday, our pastor started a 4-week series over the book of Ruth. We read through the first chapter and the pastor challenged all of us to memorize scripture and commit it to our long term memory. The scripture for this week is:

Ruth 1:16-17 - "But Ruth replied, “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. ¹⁷ 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.”

Those are two pretty powerful verses. The book of Ruth starts out describing the trials that Naomi goes through. By the end of the first chapter Naomi has requested that her name be changed to Mara (which means bitter). She had moved away from her home, her husband died, her two sons married Moabites and then her two sons died.  At the end of the first chapter, Naomi's daughter-in-law begged Naomi to let her return to Naomi's homeland of Bethlehem with her. That's where the two verses above come from. 

So as I've been thinking today, it doesn't really matter what goals you set or what you try to obtain for yourself through the year - the best year you can have is by going where He goes and staying where He stays. Realizing that God has you where you are for a purpose, no matter what struggles you are going through. 

Maybe you are looking for a new job, maybe you want to move to a different town, maybe you just lost your job, or you've been hurt by a friend, co-worker or spouse. Maybe not - maybe everything is going perfect in your life right now. But wherever you are in life right now the greatest goal we could set is to go where He goes and stay where He stays. In that we will find the greatest happiness and peace. 

Here's to tomorrow - day 2 of keeping our new year's goals.