Grains of wheat & ears of corn.
When we lived in Kent I would regularly walk our dogs around a local farm, down a dusty track that wound its way around the edge of a field of golden wheat. Well, sandy beige wheat ?. When we learned we would be moving away I worried that I would miss our last Kentish harvest. But, about 3 days before we moved out came the combine, and the swathes of corn were scythed and collected.
Stage by stage the field is stripped bare, or so it seemed. Left on the ground, to be trodden underfoot were thousands and thousands of grains of corn littering the field.
As I walked (slipped…. dry abandoned corn is slippery!) around the field, all I could think about was Ruth. Ruth was a generous young lady who, when her husband died young, stayed with her mother in law and travelled with her to another country to live. They had no money for food, there were no food banks, no benefits to save them, so Ruth went to the local farm and as the harvesting ended for the day she sat amongst the broken stalks, gleaning the grains of corn, picking up each grain and placing them into her bag.
And I could sense how she might have felt: starving, degraded, trying to collect as much grain as she could before the sky darkened around her and she could collect no more. 1350 BC Ruth was starving, and desperate. The corn she gleaned would save her, and was a true gift of life. A gift from a God.
In Deuteronomy it says,
God had planned for times such as these. Farmers, people who grew grapes, olives and wheat, were instructed, by law, to leave crops in the field when they harvested for the poor, the elderly and widowed to freely collect, use and sell. Not a perfect system, but something.
It made me think, as harvest festival draws ever closer, about our provision today for people who are struggling. Food banks are feeding more people than ever, yet food wastage seems to also be ever increasing. Those who have eat well, and those who don’t have go hungry across the world.
What can I do, to leave the margins of my field unharvested. What can I do to leave olives on my trees and grapes on my vines? How can I better serve those in need? How about you?
