Church Message

If you are a parent, a business owner, or shift manager over other individuals then understanding leadership is so very important.  Everyone makes decisions, and many of them every single day, however, when you are leading others you understand the gravity of the responsibilities you have to others.  The larger the family or larger the business will mean the more decisions have to be made regularly, and oft times you don’t have very long to have to make one.

In Ruth 1:1 Elimelech was the husband of Naomi, and the father of two sons: Mahlon and Chilion. He had raised his family in Bethlehem and it is at this time living through a famine. There isn’t food to be had, and everyone in the area is suffering from it because, “again they did evil in the eyes of the Lord” Judges 3:1. Elimelech now is faced with the decision of what he’s going to do to take care of his family.  He doesn’t know how long the famine will last and he doesn’t know how long they would be gone if they were to go somewhere else. What is important right now, is that he is confronted with a decision, and that decision will affect directly 3 other people.

Elimelech made a decision to transplant his whole family to a foreign nation who was in opposition to God in a season of a famine in his homeland.  But the decision would be costly.  Elimelech died, Mahlon and Chilion also died, and now Naomi’s a widow. She’s a widow in a foreign land that brought about her two daughters in law, Oprah and Ruth, and after persuasion Oprah went back to her own people. For all intent and purposes, Naomi lost everything because of her husband’s decision to move. When she returned to Bethlehem some 10 years later they almost didn’t recognize her because life had been so hard on her.  She was questioning her very identity, and a name change from Naomi which means “pleasantness,” to “Mara” which means bitter.  I think after what she suffered through I may be bitter as well.

This week let me encourage you to “pray about it” before you make those decisions that affect others.  Let them see confidence in you that you have sought the wisdom and counsel to equip you for success. And remember, when you are responsibility for making decisions for others, it’s never just about you because every decision affects other people, too.