Ruth is noble. Ruth is selfless. Ruth is mindful. Ruth is demure. Ruth is David’s grandmother.

I haven’t read her story thoughtfully for a long time.

I had to last week, because Ruth was in my Sunday lectionary readings. And so, after a couple shifts at the hospital with conversations with people moving toward dying, I read about Mara.

That’s Ruth’s mother-in-law. We know her as Naomi. But she called herself Mara for a few years. Bitter.

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The family wanted me to talk in the hallway, so the man with the tube down his throat wouldn’t hear.

He wasn’t responding to much anyway. He hadn’t had any sedation for a few days. But we were going to talk about funeral homes and finances. His funeral home. And his wife and daughter didn’t want to trouble him.

We talked. They were courageously willing to talk about practical next steps.

“Would you pray for him?” they asked. They wanted me to pray in a way that would encourage his faith. Because, they said, since all this had happened, he’d been wondering why God was doing this.

I talked to them about the persistence of God’s commitment to us. And we went in and I talked with God while holding his hand.

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The next morning, I read about Mara. Let me tell you what she said upon her return from Moab to Bethlehem.

Don’t call me Naomi,” she told them. “Call me Mara, because the Almighty has made my life very bitter. I went away full, but the Lord has brought me back empty. Why call me Naomi? The Lord has afflicted me; the Almighty has brought misfortune upon me.”

Naomi means loveable. Mara means bitter. She changed her name to match her experiences. And no one argued with her. Who could? She had left the country. Her husband died. Her two sons died. She had one daughter-in-law that returned to Bethlehem with her, but with no children, no prospects.

I’ll come back to this tomorrow. Probably. Or we could take the amount of time it took for Naomi to know more of her own story. And it was much longer than the 10 minutes it takes to read the book of Ruth.