The Wedding Planner
The Wedding Planner
Ruth 3:1-4
Then Naomi her mother-in-law said to her, “My daughter, should I not seek rest for you, that it may be well with you? Is not Boaz our relative? … See, he is winnowing barley tonight at the threshing floor. Wash therefore and anoint yourself, and put on your cloak and go down to the threshing floor, but do not make yourself known to the man until he has finished eating and drinking. … Then go and uncover his feet and lie down, and he will tell you what to do.”
Naomi can feel the spiritual wind blowing in her direction now, and she’s ready to move with it. Maybe she concocts this plan after a sleepless night of rolling different options around in her head. Or maybe she takes time to develop it, spending days in the market talking with townsfolk, making light conversation, asking when Boaz might be coming back to town and what his typical routine is, but doing so in a way that avoids suspicion. She’s seeing life from 10,000 feet up now, from atop the wings of Almighty God, and it’s time to stop wallowing in self-pity. She knows that Ruth is far too modest a woman and Boaz is far too humble a man to make the defining move on their own, and she knows that Ruth’s faithfulness deserves a shot at prosperity and posterity, so she gets busy planning a wedding.
Consider that the difference between a woman’s destructive cunning and her productive cunning isn’t in the manner of the manipulation, but its end goal. Sarah used her feminine craft to weasel Abraham into sleeping with a servant girl, and Rebekah used hers to dress Jacob up in goat hair to steal a brother’s blessing, and Delilah used hers to pry a secret out of Samson. We shouldn’t undervalue the God-given forcefulness of the feminine, with all its subtleties and ingenuities, because God crafted women to move and shake the world the way a harpist plays a harp or a seamstress weaves a dress or a spider spins a web: delicately and softly and sublimely. And when she does that for the glory of God and for the good of others, when she sows seeds of peace rather than discord, when she encourages rather than gossips, she moves heaven and earth toward a wedding feast! And the pitter-patter of her toil culminates in the triumphant wedding march of redeeming love.