6

God’s Gift: Ruth

The most important teacher I ever had—the single greatest influence on my worldview—I first encountered at the beginning of my sophomore year in college. It was during orientation. I was trying to recruit new students to join our Christian Student Union. I was already scanning the room for prospects when an attractive freshman girl walked up. I welcomed Ruth (that’s what her nametag said) to the college and invited her to sign up for our organization.

Ruth glanced at me for a moment, and granted me a slight smile as she very properly replied, “My father is a minister, so I am sure that I’ll be active in many Christian activities on campus.” With that she turned and walked away.

I was already smitten. Watching her go, I told my friends, “I’m going to marry that girl one day.”

It’s fair to say that I didn’t know much about relationships at that time. I had been told that “opposites attract.” If that old cliché was true, Ruth and I were a match made in heaven. I realized from the start that we were polar opposites; she was everything that I was not. That was probably a major factor in my falling for her.

We were both PKs. She was a preacher’s kid, and I was pretty much a pagan kid.

She had grown up in a variety of places. I had spent my entire life in one little town.

She had visited dozens of states across the United States. I had left Kentucky only once before my eighteenth birthday.

Ruth seemed to fit in well in any situation. I often felt like the proverbial square peg forced into a round hole.

She struck me as a very sophisticated city girl. I was just about as country as they come.

Ruth’s grasp of grammar and her mastery of the language made her voice sound elegant to me. English teachers the world over would cringe every time I opened my mouth.

She was too good to be true. I was too many things to be truly good.

She had known, loved and followed Jesus as long as she could remember. She had read the Bible daily and regularly discussed spiritual and biblical concepts virtually all of her life. She had been involved in every activity of church every time the doors were opened. I had not had any genuine, personal faith until that first encounter with God in the back corner of the cheese factory weeks before I enrolled in college.

Ruth had personally met many missionaries. They had spoken at her church and visited in her home. I encountered my first missionary within weeks of the time I met Ruth.

Ruth went to the altar in church to accept her call to the mission field when she was still in elementary school. In sixth grade, she wrote a school paper on Africa. At that time, she knew that God wanted her to go there. I first heard of Jesus’ Great Commission when I read Matthew as a college student, and I was still trying to figure out what in the world that might possibly mean for me.

To me, Ruth seemed absolutely perfect. I was not.

Total opposites? Certainly.

Made for each other? I wasn’t so sure.

I was crazy about Ruth from the start, but I didn’t know how to build a loving, godly relationship. It wasn’t long before I realized that I loved her deeply. But that didn’t mean that I knew how to treat her. I knew that she was the kind of woman that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with, but I couldn’t envision the marriage that I wanted to have.

My dad, who never gave any of his six sons advice on affairs of the heart, said to me after he met Ruth for the first time, “If you don’t keep this one, son, don’t come back home.”

I should have listened to him. But I didn’t.

My relationship with Ruth was a rocky one, and I was to blame for that. One problem was that I had never seen a marriage that worked. I didn’t have any model or example that I could emulate. Ruth and I had an on-and-off relationship for about three years. Ruth was patient and forgiving; I was confused and confusing.

As my graduation from college approached, things were far from settled. After graduation, I planned to stay on campus to work until I moved away to start seminary in the fall. Ruth had a much more exciting summer planned—she was going to spend her summer on a short-term mission trip to Zambia.

I was cutting grass on a tractor mower when I spotted her across campus the day that she was scheduled to leave for home to pack for her trip. When I waved, she saw me and walked over to tell me good-bye.

I am ashamed to admit it now, but I didn’t even bother to get down from the tractor to talk to her. Knowing that she was about to begin an adventure that she had dreamed about all her life, and knowing that I would be gone to seminary when she got back, all I managed to say to her that day above the sound of the mower was, “I hope you have a nice summer.”

She wished me the same, gave me a half-hearted little wave and walked away. I think I sensed then, deep down in my heart, that I had no future with Ruth. I had fallen for her three years before, but I still didn’t know how to have a healthy relationship—and now she was going halfway around the world to pursue her life dream. I had not even attempted to acknowledge or address her feelings.

And I had not attempted to acknowledge or address mine.

As I sat on the tractor and watched Ruth walk away, there was at least a part of me that recognized what I had just done. I certainly hadn’t meant to. If you had asked me, I would have truthfully told you that it was the last thing that I would have ever wanted to do. Yet I did it anyway—I had broken Ruth’s heart.

Maybe absence makes the heart grow smarter as well as fonder. Maybe I finally had an emotional growth spurt that summer that brought me to a deeper maturity. Maybe a summer of mindless work on campus gave me time to consider all that had happened to me in the past four years. Whatever the reason, by the end of a lonely and troubled summer, I knew that I had made a terrible mistake in the way that I had treated Ruth—and not just that last day when I didn’t even say a proper good-bye. After three years of a tumultuous relational roller-coaster ride—I was suddenly terrified that the ride was over.

I desperately wanted to make things right with Ruth. But how?

I decided to start by swallowing my pride and apologizing. Soon after Ruth got back from Africa, I worked up my courage and called her. The coolness in her initial response only confirmed my fears. I pressed quickly past the greeting and small-talk about our summer experiences. I quickly launched into what felt to me like an abject apology for the unfeeling, cavalier way that I had said good-bye before her trip, for my lack of consistent commitment to our relationship, and for so much more.

Ruth didn’t give any sort of audible response to what I was saying. She just let me apologize. But I did get a very clear message from what she didn’t say. The conversation ended with these chilly words: “Well, thanks for calling, Nik. Good-bye.” And she hung up.

I was crushed. I would do anything to get her back. But how?

A week later I called Ruth again and told her, “We’re having a special missions emphasis week at the little church that I’m pastoring this year. And I would like for you to come and share with my congregation about your ministry in Zambia this summer—the people you met, the needs you encountered, the way you saw the Lord work, whatever you’d like to share. We will take up a love offering for the students going on next year’s trip.”

How could anyone called to overseas service turn down a chance to talk about her first overseas mission experience? She couldn’t. Although I didn’t sense any excitement in her acceptance, I gave her the date and told her that I would pick her up that Sunday morning. Ruth told me that I didn’t need to pick her up, that she would be glad to drive herself. I assured her that it was “no bother” and that the church was hard to find on those unmarked country roads.

Ruth was not nearly as glad to see me as I was to see her when she climbed into my car that “Mission Sunday.” She answered the questions that I asked about her Zambia trip with minimal detail. She didn’t say much when I asked about her new fall classes. I did most of the talking. She listened politely. There was clearly a barrier between us that I had never sensed before.

I knew that Ruth would impress the congregation when she spoke that morning. And I thought that she did do a fine job. Still, she was quite cool after the service. On the way back to town, the tension eased a bit. By the time I let her out at her dorm, I felt that I at least had a chance. Once again, we began spending time together.

Our relationship seemed different this time around. Mostly, I was different. I felt that I was ready to make a serious commitment. Many of Ruth’s friends advised Ruth not to give me another chance. Somehow, though, she believed in my commitment to her now. Later that year, when I asked Ruth if she would marry me, she said “yes.”

When we went to talk with her parents, her father didn’t ask me a thing. He simply turned to Ruth and asked, “What about your call to missions? What about your call to Africa?” She smiled and assured her daddy that “Nik has always wanted to serve overseas, too. We’re going to be working toward that together.”

That was all her father needed to hear. “If you are obedient to the Lord,” he said to both of us, “you have our blessing!”

We were married the next summer in Ruth’s home church. I was thrilled at the prospect of marriage. Ruth claims that she was too, but she walked down the aisle sobbing so hard that her father had to take several minutes to settle her before he could conduct the ceremony. It was a beautiful service and a wonderful evening. I still remember it as a very special time.

When we saw my mother after the ceremony, she was crying. She hugged us and said, “No matter what happens, just remember that I love you.”

After Mom walked out, Ruth turned to me, obviously puzzled, to ask, “What was that all about?”

“I don’t really know,” I said. Then I had an intuitive flash, “But I think she’s leaving Dad.”

If I had said to Ruth, “We’re going to Mars for our honeymoon,” she would not have found that any harder to process than my casual speculation. The words that had just come out of my mouth simply made no sense to Ruth.

Her minister daddy had just married us. Ruth had never experienced the world that I grew up in. We found out later that, while the wedding guests were gathered outside the church to watch the newlyweds make their exit, my mom slipped out of the crowd and drove away—never to go home again.

My parents’ marriage ended the night mine began. Looking back, I suppose what was most disturbing to my bride was the fact that I took that news in stride. It may also explain why I struggled so much to master the basics of relationships just as I did to master the basics of faith.