Melissa Florer-Bixler is pastor at Raleigh (N.C.) Mennonite Church. 

The swelling joy of Advent is complicated. A season that celebrates a surprise pregnancy, a healthy baby, and a growing family is no easy negotiation for people who through circumstance or health, late marriage or child loss or infertility, find themselves peering into the barn from a distance. It’s a complicated season for people separated from the children whom they have wanted and waited for—children for whom they still want and wait.

Naomi is the saint for these beloved, the saint who enters Advent as “mara,” the Hebrew word for bitterness.

Saint Naomi, the one whose life is an unfolding tragedy of child loss, the one who settles into the ruins of the death of her children and her spouse, the devastation of her future.

The book of Ruth spares no feeling on the death of Naomi’s family. First her husband dies then, like vapor, the children are dead. The unimaginable takes place in two verses. The two sons died–“the two of them, both.” Gone.

The closing passage of the book of Ruth ends where it begins – with Naomi. All the other characters fade into the background: Boaz, the redeemer; Ruth, the child-bearer. They fade away, and here at the end is Naomi with Ruth’s child nestled in her arms, a sure sign of the continuation of God’s love and care–not only for Naomi but for her people, a sign that God will make a way where there is no way.

I’m especially thankful for the way this story interrupts the strong current in the Old Testament of God’s redemption taking the form of overcoming bareness.

Instead, for Naomi, the unspoken prayer for new life is answered outside of childbearing. God, “the one who breathes life back into,” does so by making Naomi a foster-mother.

God, “the one who nourishes,” does so through a community of women who become to Naomi a family. “The women of the neighborhood” pronounce a blessing upon her. These women name the baby, name him Obed, the only occurrence of women giving a child a name in the Hebrew Bible.

I don’t expect that the child, Obed, filled the space in Naomi’s heart. Loss is always more complicated. What we do see is that God reimagines the family—that God imagines a way of being bound to one another outside blood ties.

There is a stirring and remaking in the midst of tragedy. What emerges is a new kinship, a new belonging, the covenant love between Naomi and Ruth, a foster child, a neighborhood of women blessing and giving name.

Last week I peered into our play room to see a friend pretending “baby owl” in the corner with my toddler. I could hear their laughter filling the house as I left for work.

On Sunday, one of the teenagers from my church takes Etta Wren to the playground during Sunday school. It’s a different kind of school, one of nurture and belonging.

For years, our older daughter’s Sunday school class was taught by a young, single woman from our church. I am always mindful of how much of our little one’s life of faith was formed by her, a foster mother of faith.

We are always being remade by the “women of the neighborhood” who name us as their family, who complicate the story of longing and belonging.

Naomi offers no easy answers, no easy solutions this Advent. Instead she comes to us, both bitterness and fulfillment, cradled by a remarkable family, cradling in her arms a child of promise.

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