Grief does not have to be finished to be faithful. This study tests that claim against the Bible itself. Scripture keeps the words of people who were still hurting, still confused and sometimes angry at God, and it keeps them as prayers. The guide reads three of them closely: Naomi coming home to Bethlehem in Ruth 1, Job in the middle of his argument with God, and two psalms that end in very different places. By the end you should be able to say, from the text and in your own words, how grief that is still talking to God differs from grief that has stopped expecting anything from him.
You can work through it alone with a Bible and a notebook, or with a group over one long meeting or two shorter ones. Read each passage before you read the comments on it. The observation prompts come first on purpose. Nothing here asks you to share a wound you are not ready to share.
Read Naomi’s words before deciding what they mean
Open to Ruth 1 and read verses 1 through 5 for the background: a famine, a move to Moab, and the deaths of Naomi’s husband and both of her sons. Then read verses 19 through 22 slowly. The whole town stirs when she arrives, and people ask whether this is really Naomi. Her answer, in Ruth 1:20-21, is the center of the chapter.
And she said unto them, Call me not Naomi, call me Mara: for the Almighty hath dealt very bitterly with me. I went out full, and the LORD hath brought me home again empty: why then call ye me Naomi, seeing the LORD hath testified against me, and the Almighty hath afflicted me?
Before reading further, mark three things in the passage:
- Who Naomi says acted. Count how often she names God, and which names she uses.
- The two words she sets against each other in verse 21.
- What she asks to be called, and why a new name would matter to her.
Here is what the text shows. Naomi’s name is usually understood to mean “pleasant,” and Mara means “bitter.” She names God four times in two verses, twice as the Almighty and twice as the LORD. That detail matters. Naomi does not say God is absent or unreal. She says he is the one who did this. Her complaint is aimed at God, which means it is still addressed to him.
Notice also what she says about herself: she went out full and came home empty. Verse 22 records that Ruth came back with her. Many readers see that the narrator quietly sets Naomi’s word “empty” beside the daughter-in-law who refused to leave her. That is an observation about how the story is told, not a rebuke written into the text.
Dr. Christina Edmondson, a college dean whose academic background includes counseling psychology and marriage and family therapy, hears an accusation in Naomi’s words. She contrasts it with a calmer trust that God has allowed suffering in order to shape a person, and she puts Naomi’s tone this way: “I’m blaming you God, like you’ve jacked up my life.” Then she makes the observation that reorganizes the whole passage: “Now, the women don’t stay there, though.”
Follow the story past the bitter line
Edmondson’s point depends on reading Ruth as one story rather than a single quotable verse. So keep going. The last line of chapter 1 adds a detail that is easy to skip: “they came to Bethlehem in the beginning of barley harvest” (Ruth 1:22). A woman who calls herself empty arrives at the season when the fields fill.
In chapter 2, Ruth comes home from gleaning in the field of Boaz, and Naomi’s language changes. She says, “Blessed be he of the LORD, who hath not left off his kindness to the living and to the dead” (Ruth 2:20). The same woman who said the LORD had testified against her now speaks of kindness that has not stopped. Nothing in the chapter argues her into this. She notices something that happened.
Then read Ruth 4:13-17. The women of the town speak to Naomi again, and they bless the LORD for a child they call “a restorer of thy life” (Ruth 4:15). The scene closes with this: “And Naomi took the child, and laid it in her bosom, and became nurse unto it” (Ruth 4:16). Empty in chapter 1, her arms are full by chapter 4. Edmondson describes the arc simply: “the story doesn’t end there because the story ends with a great deal of hope.”
Keep the genre in view. Ruth is narrative, and narrative describes before it instructs. The book never tells readers to imitate Naomi’s speech in chapter 1, and it never scolds her for it either. What it does is refuse to let that speech be her last word.
Was Naomi faithless or faithful?
Christian interpreters read her complaint in more than one way, and the disagreement is worth stating fairly. One reading treats her words as a lapse. She blames God and calls herself empty while Ruth stands beside her, so the book is showing a grief that has gone sour. Another reading hears her as a lamenter in the line of the psalmists. She takes her loss straight to God by name, as Israel’s prayers do, and the story honors that by answering it with provision rather than correction.
The text gives material to both readings. Edmondson’s own reading holds the two together: the blaming is real, and it is not the end. The most the passage clearly supports is this. Naomi said a bitter thing about God, to God, out loud, in public, and the story kept her in it. Her honesty did not disqualify her from the redemption the book goes on to tell.
Job: trust that keeps its argument
Read Job 13:13-19. In the middle of a long dispute with his friends, Job says, “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him: but I will maintain mine own ways before him” (Job 13:15). People often quote the first half alone. The second half matters just as much. To maintain his ways before God means Job intends to keep making his case to God’s face. His trust and his argument sit in the same verse.
The Hebrew of this line can be read in two ways, depending on one small word, and some modern translations render it closer to a statement that Job has no hope. The KJV reading is the traditional one, and either way the verse pictures a man who will not stop speaking to God about his suffering.
Edmondson reads the KJV line as two honest statements at once. One says, “God, you are sovereign and powerful,” and the other admits that “whatever is happening to me or has happened to me is very painful.” Then comes the decision: “yet I’m going to trust you at the same time.”
Now turn to the end of the book. After speaking to Job out of the whirlwind, God says to one of the friends, “ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath” (Job 42:7). Interpreters debate how far that approval extends, since God has also just challenged Job at length in chapters 38 through 41. What is clear is who receives the rebuke. It goes to the friends who defended a tidy explanation of suffering. It does not go to the man who complained to God directly.
Two psalms, two endings
Read Psalm 13 aloud. It opens, “How long wilt thou forget me, O LORD? for ever? how long wilt thou hide thy face from me?” (Psalm 13:1). By verse 5 the psalmist says, “But I have trusted in thy mercy; my heart shall rejoice in thy salvation.” Nothing in the psalm explains what changed. The trust comes without an answer to the question “how long.”
Then read Psalm 88, which does not turn. It begins, “O LORD God of my salvation, I have cried day and night before thee” (Psalm 88:1), and it ends, “Lover and friend hast thou put far from me, and mine acquaintance into darkness” (Psalm 88:18). There is no closing praise. This is poetry, and it should not be read as a formula. Still, Scripture includes a prayer that ends in the dark, and that inclusion says something. The only hope in Psalm 88 is in its first line, where the writer still calls the LORD the God of his salvation and keeps crying out to him. Sometimes hope is no larger than continuing to pray.
Where the line falls
With these texts in front of you, Edmondson’s definition becomes something you can test. Bitterness, she says, is something “I would describe it as a hopeless lament.” She explains it as “the reality of the pain, the suffering, detached from hope.” By that measure, Naomi, Job and the writer of Psalm 88 all lament without being cut loose from hope, because each one keeps addressing God. Their pain is fully stated. It is still attached to someone.
Edmondson names the danger as staying in that place while denying God’s goodness. She describes it as “denying God his intrinsic identity as good.” That raises a fair question about Naomi, who said the Almighty dealt bitterly with her. Was that a denial of God’s goodness, or an honest report of how his dealings felt? The discussion questions return to this.
Edmondson also gives a sign you can check in yourself: whether “we can’t be soothed and we don’t want to be soothed.” Naomi was not soothed in chapter 1. By chapter 2 she could receive kindness when it came. And Edmondson warns about what happens when honest speech is shut down. When people are denied the chance to put painful disappointment into words, she says, “they’re not able to receive grace through repentance and correction.” On her account, lament is the doorway grace comes through. It is not the opposite of grace.
A practice: an addressed complaint
This exercise borrows the shape of the laments you just read. Do it on paper, privately. You can repeat it over several days.
- Address God by a name, as Naomi did. Choose whichever name you can honestly say.
- Say what happened, plainly. Edmondson’s counsel applies here: “if things are messed up, you should acknowledge that they’re messed up.” Do not soften it.
- Ask the question you actually have, even if it is only “how long.”
- If it is true for you, write one line of what you still expect from God. It may be as small as the first line of Psalm 88. If you cannot write it yet, leave the space blank and come back another day. Naomi’s speech in chapter 1 ended with a question, too.
You are not informing God of anything. As Edmondson puts it, “God already knows our heart.” Over the week, notice whether that fourth line changes, and notice whether you are starting to refuse comfort you could accept.
Then consider whether one person should see what you wrote. Edmondson says, “Community is essential,” and she pictures a trusted friend asking, “dear brother, dear sister, is bitterness taking root?” She adds a limit that matters: such words help “when there’s a relationship of trust and respect.” Choose someone who has already taken your pain seriously, or choose no one yet.
Questions for discussion
- Naomi names God four times while complaining. Does addressing a complaint to God change what kind of complaint it is? Why or why not?
- Was Naomi denying God’s goodness in Ruth 1:20-21, or reporting how his dealings felt? What in the passage supports your answer?
- Naomi’s language changes in Ruth 2:20 after kindness reaches her. What does the story suggest moves a person out of bitterness, and what does it leave unexplained?
- Job promises both to trust God and to argue his case before him. Can those coexist in your own prayers, or does one tend to crowd out the other?
- Psalm 88 ends in darkness. What would be lost if the Bible contained only psalms like Psalm 13?
- Edmondson connects bitterness to not wanting to be soothed. How would you tell the difference between grief that cannot yet be comforted and a refusal of comfort?
If you are leading a group
Read each passage aloud before anyone comments, and let the observation prompts do their work. Leave silence after the readings. Invite people to work with the texts rather than their own stories, and make it clear that the written practice is never collected or shared unless someone chooses to share it.
Do not correct someone’s lament while they are speaking it. The book of Ruth gives Naomi room, and a group can too. When someone describes a wrong done to a person they love, watch for a pattern Edmondson draws from the story of Tamar in 2 Samuel 13, where Tamar is pushed aside while her brother fixes his attention on the man who assaulted her: “We can see how bitterness can cause us to actually miss the victim.” Keep the group’s care on the wounded person rather than on the offender.
Some wounds need more than a study group. Edmondson herself points people first to careful biblical exposition, and also to good clinical help. Seeing a trained counselor is not a failure of faith, and you can say so plainly. If someone is being harmed by another person now, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is at 1-800-799-7233. If grief turns toward thoughts of ending one’s life, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.
Go back once more to Ruth 1:22. The narrator records Naomi’s word “empty” and, in the same breath, the beginning of barley harvest. She could not see what that season would bring, and the story does not blame her for that. It only keeps her in the place where the filling would come.