Ruth 1: 19-22 | The Two Women Went On | TCBS

"Lament is not the lack of faith. Lament is an expression of faith." - Pastor Chris Reed

There is a moment in the book of Ruth that is easy to rush past. Naomi and Ruth have made the long journey from Moab. They have arrived in Bethlehem. The hard part, one might assume, is over. And yet when Naomi finally stands among her own people again, she does not exhale. She does not celebrate. She opens her mouth and names her pain out loud for everyone to hear.

In this episode of the Tree Church Bible Study, Pastor Stacey Crawford and Pastor Chris Reed study Ruth 1:19-22, sitting with Naomi in one of the most honest moments in all of scripture and asking what it means to bring unfiltered grief before God.

When Naomi and Ruth walked into Bethlehem, the town took notice. The text says the entire town was stirred - or in some translations, excited - by their arrival. Pastor Chris pointed out that the Hebrew here is deliberately ambiguous. The word carries the sense of a commotion, a ruckus, a stir. It could reflect genuine joy at a long-lost family member returning. It could equally reflect the kind of gossip that runs through a community when someone comes back under complicated circumstances.

Pastor Stacey noted the visual weight of the moment. Naomi had left with a husband and two sons. She was returning with neither - only a foreign woman walking beside her that no one in Bethlehem knew. After ten years in Moab, marked by famine, loss, and grief, Naomi herself may have been barely recognizable. The women of the town asked the question that the text preserves for a reason - is this really Naomi?

Whatever the town felt, the important thing, Pastor Chris observed, is that she was welcomed back. She was still family. She still belonged. And in that, he drew a connection to the posture of God himself - that when his people return, even after walking away, there is acceptance to be found.

That connection to return and acceptance opened a conversation about what Naomi's homecoming mirrors in the broader story of scripture.

Pastor Chris noted that the Hebrew word for return used repeatedly in this passage - shuv - is the same word the prophets use when calling Israel back to repentance. It is a word that means turn around and come back. And so Naomi's physical journey from Moab back to Bethlehem carries a deeper weight. It is not just a geographical return. It is a picture of repentance and restoration.

Pastor Chris drew on three stories from Luke 15 to give that picture its full shape. The lost sheep wanders off, not necessarily in rebellion but simply in the way that life can carry a person away from where they should be. The lost coin rolls under the dresser, haphazardly displaced. The prodigal son makes active choices to reject his father, squanders everything he has been given, and eventually comes to himself and turns back home. In all three stories, the response of the one doing the searching is the same - rejoicing at what was found.

That, Pastor Chris said, is the posture of God toward Naomi. And it is the posture of God toward anyone who turns back toward him.

But here is what makes this passage remarkable. Naomi comes home. She is accepted. And then she says something that stops the celebration cold.

Don't call me Naomi, she tells the women. Call me Mara. Naomi means pleasant. Mara means bitter. And she is not using the word loosely. She lays it out plainly - she went away full and the Lord has brought her back empty. The Almighty has caused her to suffer. Tragedy has been sent upon her.

Pastor Stacey acknowledged the tension in Naomi's words. In one sense, calling herself full when she left feels strange - she left during a famine, after all. But in the way that mattered most to Naomi, she had been full. She had a husband. She had sons. She had a future. Now she had none of those things. In a culture defined by honor and shame, where a woman's social standing was tied entirely to the men in her life, Naomi had lost everything that gave her a place in her community.

Pastor Chris added that the weight of that loss extended beyond grief into shame. To return to Bethlehem without a husband, without sons, bearing what could easily be read as the visible evidence of God's disfavor - that was to lose face in the most complete sense possible. Naomi was not just sad. She was exposed. And she knew it.

What she does not do, however, is pretend otherwise.

This is where the conversation turned to one of the episode's central themes - the practice of lament and why scripture is full of it.

Pastor Stacey was direct about why this matters. There is a temptation in Christian faith to smooth over the broken places too quickly, to put on a mask of faith and act as though things are fine when they clearly are not. Naomi does none of that. She comes back a mess, Pastor Stacey said, and she lets people know she is a mess. That honesty, far from being a failure of faith, is actually the beginning of where real healing can take root.

Pastor Chris built on that with a definition of lament that reframes what it actually is. Lament, he explained, is evidence of two things at once. First, it is evidence of a life lived in a world where we do not have as much control as we think we do. Loss is real. Disappointment is real. Heartbreak does not just pass. It touches people at their core. Scripture acknowledges that. Lament gives language to it.

But the second thing lament is evidence of is relationship with God. To bring grief to God - to cry out to him, to name what is broken before him - requires that there is someone there to receive it. The absence of faith would look like despair with nowhere to turn. Lament, by contrast, says that even in the depths of bitterness, there is still a God worth addressing. There is still someone who can hear.

To give that idea its fullest weight, Pastor Chris turned to Psalm 22 - and specifically to the moment Jesus quotes it from the cross.

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? That opening cry is lament in its rawest form. And Pastor Chris pointed out the significance of who is saying it. If anyone in the history of the world did not deserve heartbreak and abandonment, it was Jesus. And yet there he is, on the cross, giving voice to the deepest possible expression of suffering and desolation.

But the psalm does not end there. It moves through the anguish and arrives at vindication. Pastor Chris read from the closing verses - the psalmist's declaration that God has not despised or ignored the suffering of the afflicted, that he heard when the psalmist cried out, and that future generations would proclaim what he had done. The resurrection, Pastor Chris observed, is the answer to the lament of the cross. Jesus knew that when he quoted the psalm. He was not simply expressing despair. He was walking the full arc of lament - from the cry of abandonment to the confidence of God's faithfulness.

That arc, Pastor Chris said, is what lament always intends. It is not a dead end. It is a conversation with a God who hears, who sees, and who moves.

Pastor Stacey drew the conversation toward the practical reality that many people carry into their faith - the experience of believing God with their mind and their heart while simultaneously feeling angry, confused, or undone by circumstances. She described it as joy and sadness coexisting, lament and faith holding the same space at the same time.

That, she said, is not a contradiction. It is what honest faith actually looks like.

Pastor Chris added a caution worth holding onto. There is a danger, he said, in whitewashing the broken parts of life with the language of faith and calling it trust. Covering pain with spiritual language before it has been genuinely processed is not faith - it is a mask. Naomi's honesty is not a model of spiritual failure. It is a model of genuine relationship with God, one that does not pretend the wound is not there but takes it directly to the one who can heal it.

At the same time, neither Pastor Stacey nor Pastor Chris left lament as a place to stay indefinitely. The goal is not to remain in bitterness but to move through it with God. Naomi's decision to return to Bethlehem, even in the depths of her grief, was itself an act of hope. She did not know what was waiting for her. But she moved toward God's people and God's land. And that movement was enough.

The episode closes with a detail that Pastor Stacey and Pastor Chris both flagged as significant for what is coming in the study.

When Naomi and Ruth arrived in Bethlehem, it was late spring - the beginning of the barley harvest. That single line at the end of Ruth 1:22 is easy to read past, but Pastor Chris pointed out that it is doing quiet, important work. The very God whom Naomi has declared is against her has already seen to it that there is food in the land. The blessing she went looking for is already present, already underway. She just cannot see it yet.

That is the rhythm this book keeps returning to. What looks impossible, what looks like it would keep God's blessing from coming to pass, is often precisely what makes the way for it. The barley harvest is not an accident. It is a sign. And in the coming episodes of the Tree Church Bible Study, it will become the stage on which the rest of Ruth's story unfolds.