Naomi comes home and asks her old friends to stop using her name. Naomi means pleasant. Call me Mara, she says, which means bitter. She went away full and came back empty, and she says God is the one who did it.
Grief can make you say things in church you would never put on a sympathy card. After the miscarriage, after the divorce, after burying a spouse, you may find that you are not sad so much as angry, and the anger points upward. Many people hide it because they think a believer is not allowed to feel this way.
The background is heavy. Naomi left Bethlehem during a famine with her husband and two sons. In Moab her husband died. Her sons married and then they died too. About ten years later she walks back into town with nothing but a foreign daughter-in-law. The whole town is stirred and the women ask, can this really be Naomi?
Her answer is blunt. The Almighty has dealt bitterly with me. The Lord has testified against me. She does not soften it, and the narrator does not correct her. There is no speech from a friend about counting her blessings. The book lets her say it.
But the narrator does add two quiet details. Ruth is standing right beside her, the daughter-in-law who refused to leave. And they arrive at the beginning of the barley harvest. Naomi says she came back empty, yet she came back with Ruth, at harvest time, to a town where a man named Boaz would soon notice them in the fields. God was not finished, even while Naomi was sure He was against her.
Bitterness spoken honestly to God is still a kind of prayer. It is the bitterness we bury that hardens.
If you are carrying anger toward God, say it to Him today in plain words, out loud if you can, the way Naomi did. Then look around for one Ruth, one person or provision that is still standing beside you, and thank God for that one thing, even if you are not ready to thank Him for anything else.
