Ruth 2:3 (NIV) So she went out, entered a field and began to glean behind the harvesters. As it turned out, she was working in a field belonging to Boaz, who was from the clan of Elimelek.

In life, we have strange happenings where people, places and time coincide together creating what we call coincidences. A coincidence is an occurrence of two or more events happening at the same time by what most people consider mere chance. I have come to learn that for a follower of Christ, there is no such thing as a coincidence.

The verse above is from the story of Ruth. She was a Moabite woman that had married into a Jewish family who had moved to Moab to escape a famine in Israel. It happened that her husband died, and so did her father-in-law, leaving her and her mother-in-law, Naomi, as widows. Since the men in the family were dead, Naomi decided to head back to her hometown in Israel and even though she tried to persuade Ruth to stay in her country and find another husband, Ruth insisted on staying with her mother-in-law come what may. They had no money or resources, so Ruth decided that she would try to go out and work to provide for herself and for Naomi. She went out to a certain field to glean behind the harvesters, which was something that was common and allowed so that people that were poor would have food to eat. As it turned out, the field that she happened to go to was owned by a man name Boaz, who was a kinsman of Naomi and the family's kinsman-redeemer. A kinsman-redeemer was responsible for intervening to help out in such situations. To make a long story short, Boaz wound up marrying Ruth and she and Naomi were taken care of for the rest of their lives. But that's not all.

Boaz and Ruth went on to have a son named Obed, who had a son named Jesse, who had a son named David, as in King David! Ruth wound up in the lineage of David, which was the lineage of Jesus. It all happened because "as it turned out," she went out to glean in a field that was owned by the family's kinsman-redeemer. The point is that this was no mere coincidence. This was God's purpose and plan. When you love and serve God, your life is in His hands. God, being sovereign, arranges things just the way that He has planned, and He always has higher purposes and motives for what He does. While He rewarded Ruth for her faithfulness to Naomi and for making God her God (Ruth 1:16), He had already planned for David to descend from her union with Boaz and then later on, for Jesus to come into the world through the line of David (through Joseph and Mary). God's plan is always awesome and always leads to the best life possible here on earth that you can live. That's why it is so vitally important to surrender your will and your plans to Jesus so that you will be in line for His awesome plans for your life. As it will turn out, your life will be blessed for having done so.

Pastor Joey Vazquez