Ruth - The widow’s mite

Ruth - (the widow’s mite – Mark 12:38- 13:2)

Ruth sat on the roadside, just outside the city gate, with her arms outstretched and her hands open, hoping that one of the many people entering or leaving Jerusalem that day might cast a coin or two in her direction. Others also lined the dusty track which led away from the city, each one desperate to be chosen for a casual act of charity from a passer-by. These ragged beggars formed a hotchpotch of Jerusalem’s unwanted, abandoned and avoided. Ruth competed for space on the roadside with other widows, with lepers, the lame on their mats, blind beggars, child beggars, the diseased and the disturbed…

© Simon Topping 2013