Ruth and Esther?

One of my adult daughters is in a study that combines the books of Ruth and Esther, despite the fact that the two women who lend their names to the books lived about 600 years apart. The two short books share an important message:

Even when human circumstances are most bleak—famine, death, persecution—God does not for a moment fail to act in hidden ways to bring about what he has assured: first the line of a king he has chosen, and later the unlikely survival of his people in exile.