Where You Lead.
Over the past few semesters, one of my roommates has been slowly making her way through the seven seasons of the rom-com TV series Gilmore Girls. My hunch is that most of you reading this have either seen the entire series or at least watched an episode before. The show is iconic. It follows the completely ordinary small-town life of Lorelai and Rory, a single mom and her daughter. The two are best friends, a dynamic duo who share secrets, inside jokes, a community, a house, and the last name Gilmore.
To say the theme song is catchy is an irresponsibly significant understatement. After I watched about ten episodes, it was permanently, eternally lodged in my memory. Even now, I'm humming it as I type this: "Where you lead, I will follow anywhere that you tell me to. If you need, you need me to be with you, I will follow where you lead." Call it a stretch or call it Christian liberal arts education, but I can't help thinking about Ruth and Naomi when I hear these lyrics. The story of Ruth is not unlike the story of Lorelai and Rory: a daughter choosing to stay with and do life alongside her mom (in-law). In the famous passage from Ruth 1, Ruth tells Naomi, "Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God."
In the midst of Old Testament books about war victories and exoduses and Israelite heroism comes this four-chapter story about following. When Ruth's husband (Naomi's son) dies, Naomi lets her off the hook and urges her to go back to Moab to find a new husband. To stay with Naomi-—who was much too old to produce another son for Ruth to marry—was financial and social suicide in the patrimonial society in which these women were living. But Ruth refuses to self-advocate, implementing an order of doing things that seems counterintuitive and altogether inefficient. She chooses to follow first, regardless of the cost of that commitment.
Ruth is the anti go-getter, the antithesis of that 21st century modern Miss Independent trope. She insists on being dependent and loyal to family, even risking self-preservation. Ruth's story is about headstrong humility. It's about following, and the blessings that posture proffers. And more than just an allegory about self-sacrifice and family loyalty, Ruth's story contains multi-layered messianic significance. Obviously, there is the Kinsman Redeemer character of Boaz, who is meant to symbolize Jesus. But there are also Christ-like characteristics in Ruth's actions. She embodies so many of Jesus's sermons and parables, demonstrating what it looks like to "renounce all that [she] has and become a disciple" (Luke 14:33).
I've been thinking a lot about following lately. And in brutal and transparent honesty, I do not follow Jesus well. More often than not, I'm asking Him to follow me. It is easy to go throughout life thinking we follow Jesus in the broad sense of the word, in our morals and in our actions, but think literally for a moment: in the course of your life, are you following God's lead? Or are you like me, asking God to trail closely behind as you forge ahead with your personal agenda? The order of following is endlessly important.
In Luke 14, Jesus says, "Whoever does not carry their cross and follow me cannot be my disciple....Those of you who do not give up everything you have cannot be my disciples." The passage that contains these verses is titled "The Cost of Discipleship" in most Bibles. This, I assume, is where Dietrich Bonhoeffer derived the title for his book of the same name. In it, he writes, "Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a man must knock. Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life." God's grace is what beckons us to participate in the kind of following that Ruth, Bonhoeffer, and Christ Himself demonstrate.
Yes, it is costly, sometimes inefficient, and always self-sacrificial. Yes, it is cross-bearing, life-giving death to self-discipleship. But it is Jesus to whom we are dying: the Fullness of Grace, the Perfect Leader, and the Lover of our Souls. We follow where He leads and not vice versa because His leadership is inexpressibly better for us than our own attempts at autonomy. As disciples and Christ-followers, we are called to submit to God, promising Him, "Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay." After all, we are His people and He is our God.
words and photo by Delaney Young