Glued Together by What?

BIBLE BITES

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Glued Together by What?

“Nah, it’s cool. We love hanging out. We love the same music and we’re both into hockey big time and we don’t mind giving each other space. Yeah, we’re pretty well in contact every day – one way or another. We just got back from a road trip. We stopped at a few places, took in a game and found some good eating spots. Actually we had a blast.”

Contacts. Acquaintances. Friends. Buddies. Social networking has added another dimension to our understanding of relationships – particularly those we call our friends. If social networking imploded and Flickr, Tumblr, Facebook, Google+, Twitter, QQ, MySpace, Skype, Messenger, LinkedIn, Yahoo, etc. totally crashed and all were unavailable for a year, which friends would you desperately try to stay in touch with one way or another?

If the glue of technology let go how many friends would you have? If an injury prevented you from pursuing your favourite pass-time activity, how many friends would drop off your list? In reality, how many friends do you have where the glue that actually holds you together is God? Is it a single digit number or double?

The stereotypical relationship with a mother-in-law is a relationship of necessity. Take the spouse out of the equation and the relationship fades. Thank God for beautiful exceptions to the classic jokes.

Ruth’s life was shattered. Her young husband died. Her background had nothing to do with God. She was introduced to God by marriage. But now death had shattered her present and her future. Would she revert to her past – and understandably so? After all, why did the God of her mother-in-law allow - perhaps even cause her life to be devastated?

Ruth, broken-hearted herself, observed her grief-stricken mother-in-law during her very darkest days. Her husband had died. Her two sons seemed to have died prematurely and she was left alone in a foreign country. But mother Naomi was anchored in the storms of life in a way others in this foreign land knew nothing about. If Naomi’s heart grew bitter and cold in the darkest days of her walk with the Lord, there was still an obvious glow, radiating from her life. A glue-like glow. Ruth would stick with Naomi. The bond in the relationship was God and His traces in Naomi’s life.

 
But Ruth said,

"Do not urge me to leave you or turn back from following you;

for where you go, I will go, and where you lodge, I will lodge.

Your people shall be my people,

and your God, my God.

(Ruth 1:16)

Ruth’s bottom line was: “Your God will be my God.” Orpah returned to the gods of her former life – but Ruth embraced the God of her mother-in-law and the two walked down the road into the future together. The three of them: Naomi, God and Ruth.

Is God the glue that binds you to a friend? Is the Lord the real foundation of your relationship? When personality clashes erupt and idiosyncrasies annoy and disagreements divide, is it your fellowship with the Lord that restores the harmony and maintains the bond between you and your friend?

Walk carefully and closely with the Lord today,

Warmly in Christ,

Peter Ramsay