Out of the wreckage of Judges, a small book opens like a window: in the days when the judges ruled, a famine, a family, and a Moabite widow who refuses to let go. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God.

Meanwhile, at a well in Samaria, Jesus makes the same kind of offer to a woman with five failed marriages. Loyal love is today's theme, God's, first.

Ruth's vow is the more remarkable for who makes it: a Moabite widow binding herself to a bitter mother-in-law, a foreign people, and a God she has only seen through Naomi's losses. It is covenant loyalty flowing uphill, and it will carry her into the ancestry of David and of Jesus. God loves to answer human faithfulness with plot twists.

At the well, the direction reverses: divine loyalty goes looking for a woman everyone else avoided at noon, knows her whole story, and stays two days in her despised town. Your people will be My people, God has said it over you in Christ. Say it back today, to Him, and to some inconvenient person He has given you to love.