Why Call Me Naomi?

Two women walked into Bethlehem at the start of the barley harvest, and the whole town came out to look.

The town's women saw the older one first, and they weren't sure. Can this be Naomi? She'd been gone about ten years. She'd left with a husband and two sons. She came back with none of them, beside a young foreign widow nobody in town had met.

She answered them at the edge of town, in front of everyone.

Do not call me Naomi. Call me Mara, because the Almighty has dealt quite bitterly with me.

She had come home and changed her name. Then she walked in at the start of the harvest.

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The story is told in very few words, and most of them are losses.

There was a famine in Judah, and a man from Bethlehem took his wife and two sons across the river to Moab to get through it. His name was Elimelech, and hers was Naomi. Then the record turns brief in the way it often does with death. Then Naomi's husband Elimelech died, and she was left with her two sons.

The sons married Moabite women, Orpah and Ruth. About ten years went by. Both Mahlon and Chilion also died, and Naomi was left without her two sons and without her husband.

Notice how she's described in that line. Not by who she was but by what she was left without. A wife without a husband. A mother without sons. Every word that had said who she was had been taken away in a single sentence, and the sentence is built out of the absence.

When she heard the famine was over back home, she started for Judah, and on the road she tried to send her daughters-in-law back to their mothers. She had nothing left to offer them and she told them so plainly. Return home, my daughters. Go on, for I am too old to have another husband. Then she said the thing she believed about her own life. The hand of the LORD has gone out against me.

Orpah kissed her and went home, and the text says nothing against her for it. Ruth didn't. She held on, and she said the words people now read at weddings, and when Naomi saw she meant them, she stopped trying to persuade her. So the two of them walked to Bethlehem together.

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At the edge of town she gave the women her new name, and then she asked them a question.

I went away full, but the LORD has brought me back empty. Why call me Naomi?

The name means something like pleasant. She'd been Pleasant for her whole life, and standing there she couldn't see how the word applied anymore. So she asked them, out loud, why anyone would keep calling her that.

There's a detail in her sentence that's easy to pass over. I went away full. She left Bethlehem during a famine. There was no food when she went. By any ordinary measure she left with nothing, and she called it full, because what she was counting was people. A husband. Two sons. That was what full meant to her. And she came back in a good year, at harvest, and called it empty, because the people were gone.

That's the honest arithmetic of a lot of endings. What made a life full was never mainly the salary or the title. It was who you went out the door with every morning.

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Then comes the line that answers her question, though nobody in the story says it to her.

So Naomi returned from the land of Moab with her daughter-in-law Ruth the Moabitess.

Naomi. The very next sentence after she asked to be called Mara, the storyteller calls her Naomi, and keeps on calling her Naomi for the rest of the book. Mara appears exactly once, in her own mouth, and never again. Not the narrator, not the town, not Ruth, nobody takes up the new name.

Nobody argued with her, either. Nobody told her she was wrong to grieve, or that she should look on the bright side. Her loss was real, and the record lets her say it in the bitterest words she had. It just declined to rename her by it.

And look whose name is in that same sentence. With her daughter-in-law Ruth. She said empty. The narrator put Ruth beside her in the line.

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What happened next was ordinary work, and almost none of it was Naomi's.

Ruth asked to go glean in the fields, picking up the grain the harvesters dropped, which was what the poor and the foreign were allowed to do. Naomi said only, Go ahead, my daughter. Ruth came home that first night with more barley than anyone would expect from a day of picking up leftovers, and she'd saved part of her own lunch for Naomi besides.

Something moved in Naomi that night. When she heard whose field it was, she said, May he be blessed by the LORD, who has not withdrawn His kindness from the living or the dead. Weeks earlier, on the road, she'd said the hand of the LORD had gone out against her. Now, over a bag of barley, she was talking about his kindness. Nothing large had changed. Somebody had stayed, and gone out to work, and come home.

Then Naomi did something she hadn't done since the road. She started thinking about somebody else's future. My daughter, should I not seek a resting place for you, that it may be well with you? On the road out of Moab she had wished rest for her daughters-in-law as she sent them away. Now she set about finding it for the one who'd stayed.

The one who stayed did what no title could have done. She didn't give Naomi back her old life. She gave her a reason to get up and make plans.

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Ruth married Boaz, a decent man and a relative of Naomi's husband, and they had a son.

And the women of the town came to her, very likely some of the same ones who had stared at the edge of town and wondered if it was really her. Blessed be the LORD, who has not left you this day without a kinsman-redeemer. They said the child would renew her life and sustain her in her old age, and then they said what they thought of Ruth. Your daughter-in-law, who loves you and is better to you than seven sons, has given him birth.

She had said she came back empty. Standing beside her the whole time was someone the town counted as better than seven sons.

And Naomi took the child, placed him on her lap, and became a nurse to him.

The woman who said she'd come back empty had a baby on her lap.

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Where this meets your week

What you've started calling yourself. After a role ends, people sometimes start calling themselves something new, quietly, in their own heads. Has-been. Put out to pasture. Just a former whatever. Naomi said hers out loud at the town gate, and nobody used it, not once. Take an index card. On one side, write the name you've been calling yourself, exactly as it sounds in your head. On the other side, write the name the people who love you actually use: the nickname, Mom, Grandpa, Coach, your plain first name. Keep the card where you'll see it. When the first name runs through your head, turn the card over. The story only used the second one.

"I went away full." Some of what's missing now really is missing, and it's right to grieve it. But Naomi counted her life by the people in it, and she counted the ones who were gone and missed the one beside her. Make two short lists tonight: who you've lost track of since the role ended, and who is still standing next to you. Start with the second list. It may be shorter. Read it twice. Then pick one name off it and tell that person, in a sentence, that you noticed. "I don't think I've said it, but you've been around a lot this year, and it's mattered." That's the whole call.

Home all day, together. The job ended, and now there are two people in one house all day, and both of them are in each other's way. Naomi and Ruth lived in one small house with almost nothing, and the record says only that she lived with her mother-in-law. What carried them wasn't space. It was each of them doing something for the other. Sit down together this week, with coffee, not in the middle of an argument, and ask each other one question: "What's one thing that would make your week easier?" Each of you does the other's one thing. Don't add any of your own improvements to it. Then agree on one hour a day that belongs to each of you alone, and one meal a day you eat together on purpose.

When someone won't leave. Naomi told Ruth to go home, more than once, and meant it kindly. Some people who've lost a role push away the ones who stay, because being helped feels like one more thing that's been taken. If somebody keeps showing up, stop trying to persuade them to go. Naomi finally did. The next time they offer, say yes to one specific thing: the ride to the appointment, the help with the gutters, the casserole. Say "Thank you. That would help," and stop there. No "you don't have to." They already know.

With a friend or a small group. If a few of you are in this season at the same time, read the chapter on your own and then meet. Each person answers two questions out loud: what name have you been calling yourself, and who has been standing next to you. Keep it to five minutes each, and nobody fixes anybody. Before you leave, each of you names the one person you're going to stay with, and next time you ask each other how it went. That's how the town in this story worked. The women noticed, and said so out loud.

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Pick one person and stay.

Not a cause, and not a program. One person who is about where Naomi was, on a road with less than they had. A widowed neighbor. A sibling who just lost their job. An old coworker who hasn't been out of the house much since the funeral. You probably already know who. Write the name down.

Then do the next ordinary thing that staying requires. The call, the ride, the meal brought over, the visit that isn't about anything. Make it small enough to repeat: the same day each week, an hour, for three months. Put it on the calendar the way you used to put meetings. If you don't know what to say when you get there, you don't need much. "I was thinking of you. Thought I'd come sit a while." Then sit.

They may tell you to go home, the way Naomi did. The visit may be awkward, or nobody may answer the door. Come back next week anyway. Ruth heard "go back" more than once. Staying doesn't mean pushing past a clear no. If they truly ask you to stop, stop, and send a short note once a month instead. But most of the time "you don't have to" means "I don't know how to be helped yet."

Ruth never made a speech about purpose. She stayed, and went out to the field, and came home with barley.

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The neighbor women named the boy, and when they announced him, they used the name she had asked them not to use.

A son has been born to Naomi.

They called him Obed. And they called her Naomi.