The Woman Who Walked Toward the Storm

In 1943, a young Polish nurse named Irena Sendler could have stayed safe. She had papers. She had connections. She could have kept her head down in occupied Warsaw and waited for the war to end. Instead, she walked into the Jewish ghetto carrying a carpenter's toolbox and an ambulance driver's coat, smuggling children out one by one — in burlap sacks, in coffins, under stretchers. She saved roughly 2,500 children, knowing that discovery meant execution.

When asked years later why she did it, Sendler said simply, "I was taught that if you see someone drowning, you must jump in to save them, whether you can swim or not."

Ruth understood that impulse. She left everything familiar — her gods, her family, her homeland in Moab — to walk beside a grieving mother-in-law into an uncertain future. She had no guarantee of provision, no promise of welcome. She simply went.

And Boaz saw it. He recognized the breathtaking courage of a woman who chose faithfulness over safety. "May the Lord repay you for what you have done," he told her. "A full reward be given you by the Lord, the God of Israel, under whose wings you have come to take refuge."

God's wings are not a passive shelter. They are the refuge that meets us precisely where our obedience has carried us — often into the places that frightened us most.