The Woman Who Packed Her Bags Toward Famine

In 1943, a young Dutch woman named Corrie ten Boom watched her elderly father, Casper, open their door to a Jewish neighbor trembling on the stoop. The neighbor whispered that the Gestapo was rounding up families on the Barteljorisstraat. Casper didn't hesitate. He pulled the man inside, led him to a hidden room behind a false wall, and turned to Corrie with steady eyes. "In this house," he said, "we do not calculate the cost of love."

Corrie could have walked away. She was unmarried, skilled as a watchmaker, fluent enough to find safe passage to England. No one would have blamed her. But she stayed — not out of obligation, but out of a fierce, deliberate love that refused to abandon what was right simply because it was dangerous. She chose her father's house, her father's mission, and her father's God, even when that choice led straight into Ravensbruck concentration camp.

Ruth's declaration to Naomi carries that same reckless gravity. She was a Moabite widow with every reason to turn back toward familiar gods and a second marriage. Instead, she spoke words that still burn across thirty centuries: "Where you go I will go. Your people shall be my people, and your God my God." She packed her bags toward famine, toward poverty, toward a foreign land that despised her ancestry — because hesed, that stubborn covenant love, does not run an escape route. It runs toward the beloved.