And they said to her, ‘No, we will return with you to your people.’ But Naomi said, ‘Turn back, my daughters; why will you go with me? Have I yet sons in my womb that they may become your husbands? Turn back, my daughters; go your way, for I am too old to have a husband. If I should say I have hope, even if I should have a husband this night and should bear sons, would you therefore wait till they were grown? Would you therefore refrain from marrying? No, my daughters, for it is exceedingly bitter to me for your sake that the hand of the Lord has gone out against me.”
(Ruth 1:10-13 ESV)
As she prepares to go home to Bethlehem, Naomi tells her daughters-in-law to go back to Moab. Both of their husbands are dead. The future she’d pictured is gone. And in the middle of her speech, she uses this word: tiqvah (תִּקְוָה), pronounced tik-VAH, which means “hope”.
But she uses it in the negative. “Even if I thought there was still hope for me…” She’s not holding onto hope. She’s describing the absence of it. Naomi tells these two young women that returning with her would mean a future with no husbands, no security, no real future. She wasn’t being dramatic. She was just being honest.
Here’s something worth knowing about that word. The word tiqvah shares its root with the Hebrew word for a cord or thread, like the scarlet cord Rahab hung in her window in Jericho, the one that meant rescue was coming. Hope in the Hebrew mind wasn’t just wishful thinking. It was something you held onto, something you clung to when everything else was slipping away.
Naomi looks at her life and tells these women, in effect, “There’s nothing left for me to hold onto.” That’s one of the most heartbreaking things a person can say. Not, “I’m struggling,” or “things are difficult.” But, “I’ve lost all hope.”
And yet, if we’re being honest, most of us have stood where Naomi is standing. Hope rarely collapses all at once. It’s a little disappointment here, a loss there, a prayer that seems to go unanswered. And slowly, without realizing it, we start reading the future through the lens of our pain. We don’t just say, “This hurts.” We start to say, “This is all there will ever be.”
But here’s what Naomi couldn’t see: God had not let go of the thread. What Naomi didn’t realize is that hope was already standing beside her, in the form of Ruth.
That’s often how God works. Hope doesn’t always arrive as a sudden reversal. Sometimes it shows up quietly, almost unnoticed — in a friend who stays, a small provision that comes just in time, a door that opens just wide enough to take the next step. It may not look like much, but it’s still tiqvah, still something to hold onto.
If you’re in a Naomi season right now, if you’ve looked at your situation and said, “I don’t see any hope here”, you’re not alone, and you’re not wrong to name it. But you might not be seeing everything yet. Hold on. And more than that, know that you’re still being held.
Prayer: God, there are times we look around and can’t find a single thread of hope to grab onto. We’ve tried. Remind us that our hope has never depended on what we can see. The cord called tiqvah is still in Your hands. Give us strength to keep walking, even in our uncertainty, and open our eyes to the quiet ways You are still working in our lives. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Alan Smith
Reprinted with permission from Alan Smith’s Thought For the Day