The Kingdom Moves at the Speed of Friendship

“But Ruth said, ‘Do not urge me to leave you or to return from following you. For where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God my God.”
(Ruth 1:16 ESV)

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about pace. Not the pace of my calendar, or the pace of ministry outputs, or even the pace of answered prayer (though God knows I’m always negotiating with Him about that last one), but the pace at which the Kingdom actually moves and how discipleship actually functions. What I keep coming back to, in my conversations with God and in the quiet ache of this season, is that the Kingdom of God and revival moves at the pace of friendship. 

Now, this phrase gets thrown around quite a lot these days. And for me, it didn’t come to me in a dramatic moment of revelation. This has been a slow accumulation of conviction, conversation, and honesty before the Lord. Because the truth I’ve been sitting with is deeply uncomfortable: I am way better at pouring out than I am at being known. I am better at showing up for people than I am at letting people show up for me. And somewhere in the geography of a transatlantic life and in the particular loneliness of carrying things you can’t always share with the people you lead, I’ve been running on empty in the very area I thought I was richest. 

God has been meeting me in that loneliness through Ruth. What stops me every time I sit with her declaration to Naomi is what she is not responding to: there’s no vision, no burning bush, no Kingdom strategy, just a grieving woman on a road and another woman who looks at her and says: not a chance. Where you go, I go. This is hesed; the loyal, covenant love at the very heartbeat of God’s character, made flesh in the ordinary, costly decision to stay.

The line of David moved at the pace of covenantal friendship. The Kingdom of God and the very Incarnation moved through one woman’s refusal to let another woman walk the road alone. 

Holy Spirit has been asking me something tender (and a little inconvenient) in light of all this: “What if the friendships you long for are not a consolation prize for the Kingdom work you haven’t yet accomplished? What if they are the Kingdom work?”  

What if being known isn’t a luxury I earn after I’ve served well enough, but an act of faithfulness to a God who advanced His own Kingdom at exactly this pace: one loyal woman, one grief-worn road, one decision to stay? 

I am learning, slowly and with some resistance, to receive as well as give. That to trust that slowing down to the speed of friendship isn’t unfaithfulness; it’s the method.

Leslie Hall

For Reflection

“I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything I heard from my Father. You didn’t choose me; I chose you. I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last.”
(John 15:15b-16a NET)

• Where in your ministry or daily life are you more practiced at giving than receiving? How might God be inviting you into the vulnerability of being known?

• Ruth’s hesed cost her something real. What has faithful, loyal friendship cost you? Where have you experienced the Kingdom advance through that cost?

• Where do you sense God inviting you to slow down to the speed of friendship, trusting that this slowness is not unfaithfulness but the very method of the Kingdom?