Last week, we began our journey through the Book of Ruth. It starts with someone arriving in a new place, carrying loss, questions, and uncertainty. Ruth is an outsider. A foreigner. Someone who obviously doesn’t belong.

But what she finds is something unexpected. Not just survival, but a place at the table. A place to belong. And what’s striking is how it happens.

The Book of Ruth never gives a lecture about division or prejudice. It simply tells a story where kindness crosses boundaries, courage overcomes fear, and an outsider becomes family.

Belonging, in this story, isn’t about where you’re from. It’s built through loyalty, generosity, and compassion. And that’s where this connects to us.

Because every day, people go to the Catch, ask for prayer, or seek fellowship, looking for something— carrying their own version of Ruth’s story. And often, what they discover is something even better. They discover a seat at the table.

But that doesn’t just happen on its own. It happens because people make room. That’s what MemberPartners do. MemberPartners are the people who pull up another chair. They create space. And they help turn strangers into family.

They make belonging possible for the next person who walks through the door.

Sometimes, the very people we assume are arriving empty-handed are the ones God uses to move the story forward. That was true for Ruth. And it’s still true today.

So as we begin this series on Ruth, we’re also inviting you into that same story. To not just find belonging, but to help create it.

To become a MemberPartner means to make room for the next person to belong.

But like many of us, Ruth’s story does not begin well.

See for yourself …

The story of Ruth in the Bible takes place during the time when judges ruled. It was a time between Moses and Joshua leading the Israelites into the promised land and the rise of kings and prophets. This was the time of Gideon and Deborah — a time when the people would go through a period of disobedience, and then God would send a judge to save them from their enemies (and themselves) and lead them back to Him.

This story takes place during a time of disobedience and that’s why the land is experiencing a severe famine. Elimelech, a Jew from Bethlehem, decides to escape the famine by taking his wife, Naomi, and his two sons, Mahlon and Kilion, and moving to the country of Moab. That was not a good move.

That was not a good move because the Moabites were basically pagans to the children of Israel even though they were distant cousins. The sinful origin of the tribe of Moab was an incestuous union between Lot, Abraham’s nephew, and his oldest daughter. After Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed, Lot and his two daughters were the only ones who escaped the destruction. And the daughters, fearing there weren’t any men around to carry on the line, decided to get their father drunk and have sex with him on consecutive nights and those unions were the origin of the Moabites and Ammonites, who went on to only cause misery for the nation of Israel.

Thus we have a tragic beginning to the story of Ruth. There was no indication in the text that Elimelech was necessarily wrong in taking his family to Moab, but given our very brief look at the history of the nation of Moab, it doesn’t seem like the smartest thing to do. Nor was it very smart thinking for the sons to take on Moabite wives, something forbidden in the law of Moses. And all of these smart plans and shenanigans ended in a heap of grief and sorrow when Elimelech and both his sons died, leaving only Naomi and her two Moabite daughters-in-law, Oprah and Ruth.

So, the story of Ruth begins with a depressing reality — a long string of disobedience, grief, abandonment, loneliness, hopelessness, and bad choices. Naomi has no husband, no sons, no family, just two daughters-in-law from a foreign country with their foreign gods. Things are looking awfully bleak for Naomi. She has nowhere to belong.