The Radio Nobody Turns On at Seven

For thirty one years he came in from the shed at seven, washed his hands at the kitchen sink, and reached past her shoulder to switch on the radio on the windowsill.

That was the start of an evening. After the radio came the news, then the program with the accordion band that she said she could not stand and never once asked him to turn off, then the crossword read out loud over the top of the ironing with both of them arguing about eleven across. At ten he filled the kettle. Thirty one years of that, near enough. It was not a plan anybody had made. It was just the shape three hours took in that house.

The radio is still on the windowsill. There is a folded tea towel beside it, and the dial has not moved since the March.

She stands at that sink at seven now. She does not switch it on. She does not decide against switching it on either, which is the part she cannot explain to anybody. She simply stands there while seven o'clock goes past her, and then somehow it is ten, and she has been in the kitchen for three hours with the television talking to an empty front room.

She tells people she keeps busy. She is not busy. She is standing.

Then her daughter rang on a Tuesday and asked, meaning nothing by it, what she does with her evenings now. And she heard her own voice say, oh, this and that. She put the phone down and went upstairs and sat on the end of the bed with her coat still on, and the sentence arrived whole: I have not put one single thing in there. Two years. Not a book. Not a friend on a Thursday. Not a chair pulled round to the window. Not one thing.

And underneath that, worse, the thing she has not said out loud to anybody: I would not know what to put.

You know the hour I am talking about. Yours might be six, or half past eight, or the whole of Sunday afternoon.

The verse that refuses to explain Moab

Naomi went out of Bethlehem full and came back empty, and she said so, out loud, in the street, in front of the whole town. She told them to stop calling her by her own name because it meant pleasant and she was not. There is no tidying of that anywhere in the chapter. Nobody corrects her. Nobody explains the ten years to her.

And then the chapter ends like this.

So Naomi returned, and Ruth the Moabitess, her daughter in law, with her, who returned from the fields of Moab. And they came to Bethlehem at the beginning of the barley harvest.Ruth 1:22

That is the last line. Read it twice, because almost nobody does. It does not say God had a plan and here it comes. It does not say the ten years were for something. It gives you one piece of information and it is the time of year.

The word the chapter chooses to end on is barley, not because. Ruth 1:22 hands Naomi a season and never once hands her a reason, and the Holy Spirit has been holding that line over a kitchen sink for two years now: you are not required to explain your own evenings before you are allowed to have one.

Notice also what nobody gives her in that verse. No job. No list. No suggestion that a woman in her situation should be getting out more. She arrives in a working town in the middle of a busy month, and the text simply lets her stand there, and the harvest goes on around her without needing anything from her that day.

There was no job in that verse and there is no job in this message. Ruth 1:22 does not say Naomi got straight to work, and the Spirit is not standing at your sink at seven o'clock with a list of suggestions. You have permission before you have a plan, and the permission is written down, which is more than can be said for most of what has been running your evenings.

I am not going to tell you what the eleven months were for. Scripture does not tell Naomi what Moab was for, and I have no intention of improving on that. His Spirit has never once asked a widow to produce a reason as the price of an evening, and Ruth 1:22 is the proof: you are received home with the ten years left completely unexplained.

What barley time actually says

Here is what the beginning of the barley harvest is doing in that sentence, and it is not what it gets used for.

It is not a promise that things pick up now. Nobody in the chapter says that, and I am not going to say it either, because I do not know what your next year holds and neither does anybody who tells you they do. What barley time does is much plainer and much better. It says the world she walked back into was a real month, with real work going on in real fields, and it had not stopped because she was grieving, and it did not send her a bill for the time she had missed.

The Holy Spirit is not asking you to fill three hours tonight. He is doing something smaller and more stubborn than that, and He is doing it on the ground of Ruth 1:22: you are home. Not in transit. Not in a corridor between the life that ended and some other one. Home, in an actual month, in a house with a radio on the windowsill and the dial exactly where he left it.

And if the crisis in your house has not ended, if you are reading this with somebody upstairs who needs you at nine, nothing here is asking you to go looking for an evening. The word stands over you the same. Naomi was received before she did one thing, and so are you, on the days when there is nothing at all left to put anywhere.

You have read Ruth before. It gets read at weddings, and at funerals, and the famous part went past you like everything else went past you that week. His Spirit has kept Ruth 1:22 back for you, the plainest line in the chapter, and here it is: you are placed. Named, home, in a season, with nobody counting how much of it you took part in.