Wherever you go, I will go.

Ruth 1:16b.

Like all humans, I love numbers, measurements, and statistics. How did I do on the exam? What was the score of the Lions game (OK, maybe not that)? What’s the unemployment rate, my raise for this year, the percentage of people with health insurance or bald spots? It’s all about comparison: How am I doing relative to everyone else? Am I healthier, wealthier, happier, stronger, living longer, taking more meds, getting better gas mileage … ?

Christians are certainly prone to play the ratings game. Jesus calls us to forgiveness; Peter wants to know how many times he needs to forgive. Jesus calls men and women to follow him; the rich young man wants Jesus to know that he’s number one in his class. Jesus calls us to love; someone wants to know who is or isn’t lovable. Jesus calls me to serve; how does my ministry stack up? How much or how little loom large in our calculations: How much do I need to do and how little can I get away with plague our discipleship reckoning.

Unfortunately, living by numbers and standards is a futile and fatal exercise. God tends to dismiss our formulas, and even turn them on their heads. Should I forgive seven times? No, seventy times seven (and we know that that’s not really a limiting number). Do I tithe on my net or gross income? Well, neither; it all belongs to the Lord. How much faith do I need to walk as a disciple? A tiny mustard seed.

It’s really quite impossible to know when we’ve “made it.” Life is not an even playing field. Everyday existence is full of unfairness, personal failure, the vagaries of circumstance, the weakness and even opposition of others, the hostility of a very real Devil, ways of thinking and doing and measuring that are directly contrary to God’s wisdom and character. It’s easy to come to the end of ourselves. We throw up our hands, we are done, we wonder if we will every figure out how this discipleship thing works.

Such resignation seems to represent coming to a bad end. And yet, there is clear evidence that this is not so. In my Scripture reading, I recently arrived at the Book of Ruth. The story of Ruth, her mother-in-law Naomi, and her accidental suitor Boaz is a deceptively simple life lesson. Everyone loves the actors, the twists and turns of fortune, the beautiful and moving denouement, the promise hidden in the final verses of the book. Ruth is literature at its best. We can read it a thousand times, and still find deeper truth in each retelling. Why do we sophisticates find ourselves drawn to an uncomplicated, almost naive tale of good-out-of-evil?

I think a big part of answering the question is that the narrative is about immeasurable, unquantifiable things. It’s about hope that takes root in relationships that themselves seem to spring up from nothing. When we first meet Naomi, her life seems unremarkably OK. She has one good husband and two sons. The family flees Israel because of a famine. OK, that’s hard, but doable. Then the boys marry women from Moab. That’s a bit more difficult to handle, but what else were they going to do?

Soon things begin to really go downhill. Naomi loses husband and sons, and is left as an alien with two gentile daughters-in-law. After a while, the story takes a seeming turn for the better. The famine ends in Israel; Naomi decides to return; and Ruth insists on going with her in an act of risky love. We hear Ruth’s unconditional declaration of devotion to Naomi and see a glimmer of hope. The author? Not so much. He draws for us a portrait of darkness, sorrow, even despair. Naomi (“pleasant” in Hebrew) takes on a new name, “Mara,” meaning bitter. As she surveys her past and adds up her future, she reaches an unfathomable bottom.

What do we make of this tragedy? By all accounts, Naomi was a faithful Israelite. None of the normal measurements make sense. In the words of Deuteronomy 18, she has become the tail, not the head. It appears that she did nothing to deserve her suffering. Is she simply the female version of Job, except without the three nudges hectoring her about why she’s in so much trouble? Is there nothing but the prospect of life lived with a loyal but husbandless and childless companion?

Of course what we know if we read on is that there is a God plot. We’re not dealing with Deus Ex machina – God from outside the story like the old hovering deity of a Greek play – but God fully inside. It’s a story shot through with his presence. Ruth’s resolve to join herself to the Lord and his people confirms our suspicion that she knew this all along. Like the disciples with Jesus, in the face of events and circumstances that defy our common sense, she understands that there simply is nowhere else to go.

Ruth’s experience reveals the true mystery of faith: that what we are trying to grasp, and count, and measure is beyond grasping, counting, measuring. This is the point of what we commemorate at this Christmas season. Jean Calvin’s dictum seems incontrovertible, “finitur non capacit infinitur” – the finite cannot contain the infinite. Until God said that it could and would. Or, as C.S. Lewis put it in his book, The Last Battle, “There was once a stable that held something greater than the whole world inside.” The Father has formulas that – unlike the ones we balanced in our 9th grade science classes – don’t fall into an easy equilibrium. His side of the scales weighs far heavier, laden with goodness, mercy, compassion, and grace.

Our measuring can never do justice to the height and depth, the length and breadth of the Father’s world. Gaining access to that world and its beauty and glory is not quantifiable, but relational, founded on a limitless gift of faith. This lack of equations is challenging and troubling for us. And yet it was by faith that Ruth the gentile saw into God’s reality, that there was more to Naomi and her people than met the eye. Through Ruth’s obedient faith, Naomi arrives at her confession that the Lord had “not forsaken the living or the dead” (Ruth 2:20).

I was recently praying about a pattern of sin that plagues me from time to time. I had plenty of questions about what I should do to remedy the situation. In the midst of my rather private deliberations, I sensed that the Father had a question for me: Where did I see him in my story? And then his own answer: My story was shot through with his presence. And then a direction: Lean into him and his compassion. It was important to know what was true about me. It was essential to hold to what was true about him.

Coming to grips with where the Lord is present is especially powerful when we are tempted, like Naomi, to give up our God-given names. His glory in our lives assures us that we are always daughters and sons. Because he is never absent or diminished, our identities are always secure. When we falter or find ourselves in a weary, dry land, our faith is that he will restore, not based on numerical operations, but according to who he is toward us. Like the river from the throne of God in Ezekiel and Revelation, his presence turns even the bitter into sweet, Mara into Naomi.

This is God’s math. It may seem upside down and backwards, but it’s far more stable ground to stand on than my own shaky calculations.