The Gospel of Ruth

I've been reading The Gospel of Ruth and am loving it! I wanted to share a couple of paragraphs that have meant a lot to me. One chapter she wrote is on the barren woman. Many important women in the Bible are called barren; many times the Bible says the Lord closed her womb. So what can we learn from these women? Carolyn Custis James says,

...one of the first nuggets of wisdom we gain from the barren woman is something we so easily forget: we never have all the facts. We can guess all we like at why certain things go wrong, why one woman is happily fertile and another woman helplessly watches the years slip away without a single conception despite tears and prayers and relentless faith in God. If these ancient sufferers tell us anything, it is that God's ways are mysterious. He isn't obligated to explain himself, and often he doesn't...Even when we can pinpoint "something good" that came out of a tragedy, it never balances out what we have lost...No, the balance sheet always comes up short when we try to confine God in some delicate balancing act where the physical blessings we receive match and somehow overcome our losses. We live in the realm of faith, and that means trusting God for who he is and not because things equal out or we have satisfying answers to our questions. Faith may want answers, but somehow it is able to survive without them.

And then later speaking specifically about infertility...

...So often we think women who struggle with infertility are the exceptions to the rule. If the statistics are correct, most women don't have a problem. The barren woman begs to differ. She is not an exception, she is the rule. We are all poor souls in need of a miracle, and we cannot get along just fine on our own. Every once in a while, God pulls back the curtain and shows us how things really work. He does that with the barren woman who shows us that we are all infertile. Every child conceived is a miracle-and while we all acknowledge this to be true at one level, it's easy to forget when conception and birth happen according to our timetable.

Good stuff, isn't it? : )