Old Testament
Ruth 1:16-17
16 Ruth said, “Don’t urge me to leave you, and to return from following you, for where you go, I will go; and where you stay, I will stay. Your people will be my people, and your God my God.
17 Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried. May the LORD do so to me, and more also, if anything but death parts you and me.”
New Testament
1 Peter 4:8-11
8 And above all things be earnest in your love amongst yourselves, for love covers a multitude of sins.
9 Be hospitable to one another without grumbling.
10 As each has received a gift, employ it in serving one another, as good managers of the grace of God in its various forms.
11 If anyone speaks, let it be as it were the very words of God. If anyone serves, let it be as of the strength which God supplies, that in all things God may be glorified through Jesus Christ, to whom belong the glory and the dominion forever and ever. Amen.
Ruth’s words to Naomi are steady enough to be read at funerals: “Where you go I will go.” Yet in the story they are spoken on a road, at a moment of decision, with an uncertain future ahead. Love binds itself to a person, not to a plan. It chooses companionship.
Peter calls the church into the same kind of shared life. Love, he says, must be fervent. Hospitality is to be offered without grumbling. Gifts are given to be used “to serve one another, as good stewards of God’s varied grace.” The Christian journey is never meant to be solitary.
Mobility can make loneliness sharper. People move for work, for safety, for family, and end up disconnected. Others cannot move and are stranded by circumstance. Scripture presses us to see journeys as shared: to travel together in patience, to hold space for those who go slowly, to refuse to leave one another behind.
Lord, give us faithful companionship. Make your Church a place of steady love, where hospitality is ordinary and gifts are shared. Teach us to walk with those who are grieving, relocating, commuting, caring, or stuck. And let our common life become a kind of safe convoy: neighbours carried, not abandoned, on the road you set before us.