I grew up in a rural part of Virginia dominated by family farms. Some have been in the same family for generations. As you drive past them, you can see small cemeteries, each one containing the graves of family members returned to the homestead. From time to time, I visit my mother's – off to the side of a winding country road, fenced in under a big tree. Some of my mother's family cemetery graves are over 100 hundred years old. 

I observed a similar custom when we lived overseas. It was common for family members to be returned to their home villages for burial when they passed away. I'm reminded that all of us are, in many ways, tribal, loyal, and faithful to our people.

A familiar passage in the book of Ruth illustrates this has always been so. In Ruth 1, famine, death, widowhood, and homelessness leave Naomi and her two Moabite daughters-in-law in limbo and peril. Naomi decides to return to Bethlehem – her home and the home of her people that she left decades before. She convinces one daughter-in-law to stay with her people in Moab, but the other, Ruth – refuses to leave her side. She commits to take care of Naomi for life, and in doing so, ties herself to Naomi's faith, family, and her ancestral home. 

Ruth's loyal love (hesed) for Naomi changes both of their destinies. Our faithful, sovereign God preserves the land, seed, and blessing of the Abrahamic covenant through these women. As a result, Ruth, childless, a foreigner, and a widow, becomes a key figure in the genealogical line of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. 

Ruth chose a new family, physically and spiritually. If you think about it, her faithfulness also changed our destinies. When we become part of the body of Christ, we also become part of a new family — the spiritual descendants of Ruth's family line through which the Messiah came — we are grafted in through the promise of the Abrahamic Covenant. 

Our bodies may not end up in a cemetery on the family farm, but thanks to the faithfulness of people like Ruth, and the faithfulness of God, we will for sure be with our people, among the multitudes praising Him in heaven.