I remember well, reading about the Book of Ruth in the Old Testament. We recently read the story again as a Sunday School assignment, and later we discussed it in our class. The story was about Ruth and her relationship with her mother-in-law, Naomi, but I am being drawn to think now only of the gleaners for the purpose of the thought I have in my head. Having worked in the wheat fields during harvest time as a teenage boy, I experienced first hand the nature of wheat and stubble. I was hired by a local farmer one summer to drive one of his old bulk trucks for several days while an old fashioned threshing machine harvested his wheat fields. I was only thirteen, as I recall. In those days, a lot more was expected of young boys, especially farm boys. I was not a farm boy, but many of my school friends were. I believe that connection is how I came to be driving that bulk truck during the brief harvest period. The truck was an old Chevrolet, probably a 1934 vintage or older. I remember having to pull myself up with the steering wheel to see where I was going much of the time when going through the hilly wheat fields. The invention of the early threshing machines replaced the hand reapers of old. These early threshing machines had a big swather in the front that pulled the sheaths of grain into the cutting blades that would cut the shafts of grain off about six inches above the ground, after which the shaft and the grain heads were conveyed into a shaker bin where the grains of wheat were shaken off the shaft into another bin. The shaft and the small grains of wheat were separated as the small grain would fall through a filter too small for the shafts. As one of the bulk trucks drove up alongside the threshing machine, a conveyer belt carried the threshed grain from the holding bin through a metal shoot and poured it into the bed of the bulk truck. When the truck was full of grain, the driver would drive the loaded truck to a grain elevator some miles away. We would drive over a scale where the wheat was weighed and then over a grated area where we dumped the grain out into the pit below. A conveyer belt inside the elevator would carry it to the top of the elevator and dump it into the huge storage cylinders.
Having had that experience, I can easily envision those beautiful golden/white fields when it is time to harvest. At the same time I can envision how hard it must have been to find loose grain on the ground amongst the wheat stubble after the harvest. Stubble is what is left when the reapers of old or in more modern times, the threshing machines were through cutting the shafts of the wheat away. Stubble is very stiff and even sharp. It is difficult to walk in stubble without sturdy boots, let alone moving the short stiff shafts apart with your hands to find small pearls of grain on the ground where it had fallen during the cutting and stacking process. What a grueling job it must been to be bent over all day in the hot sun gathering up what little pearls of grain had fallen. The story of the gleaners is a humble story of poor peasant women. These were women from the small villages nearby. They were allowed into the fields to glean what little grain fell to the ground. It would be grueling work. Landowners would traditionally leave some standing grain in the corners of their fields just for the gleaners of the villages. Gleaning from the standing stock in the corners of the field is a much more pleasant job than gleaning from the stubble in the open field. When gleaning from uncut wheat, the gleaners merely have to pull the heads of grain off from the top of the shaft. These peasant woman probably had to depend on whatever grain they could gather to last their families all winter. They could ill afford to have the grain they gathered ground into flour at the mill by the miller. They ground their own with a stone mallet and then only enough to make bread for a day or two. Bread may have been their staple and sometimes their only meal. The land owners of old allowed the gleaners to glean as an informal type of charity.
Some years ago, we were driving through a small town in Idaho and we happened to see a small antique store. Not being in a hurry to get home, we stopped to look inside, and it so happened that there was a replica of the painting of the “Gleaners” by Jean Francois Millet. The original is a famous painting that he had painted in 1857. The value of the original painting would cost a fortune, but we paid only a few dollars for our copy. We took it home and hung it on our wall and have probably had as much or more joy in looking at it over these many years as the owner of the original had enjoyed his. Our copy hangs on the wall opposite my lounge chair, and as I sat there the other evening, having just discussed that story in church, my thoughts were of these three woman bent over gleaning whatever pearls of grain they could find. In fact, I tried to put myself in the picture and even back in that impoverished and difficult time. As I did so, the thought occurred to me that there are many different kinds of gleaners and many different things that can and are gleaned from this wonderful world that God has blessed us with. Wheat or other grains are gleaned for a family’s sustenance. Gleaning in our day is most commonly done to benefit us intellectually. In fact, I have used the term much of my adult life. The dictionary will tell us that “gleaning” means to “gather grain or other produce left by the reapers.” The modern dictionary interpretation states that it is to “gather information or material bit by bit.” Obviously you are not a gleaner if you have the option of swooping up as much of something as you want or can. As students, and we are all students, we glean as much information from the various lessons that life has for us as we experience it. Young students glean as much from their teachers and from the textbooks during the course of an academic term. Becoming a scholar, a professional, etc. is a long drawn-out process, usually after many years of gleaning knowledge from the many fields of study or options available to us, and that includes the very latest, the Internet. Even though gleaning and the modern Internet seem like an oxymoron because of the many centuries separating the beginnings of each, the truth would probably reveal that the Internet is currently the number one gleaning machine. The three peasant woman bent over while gleaning wheat in the picture can be a valuable reminder to us as to how fortunate we are to be living in our day and with our circumstances as free and wealthy people (comparatively).
On the other side of gleaning (the old fashioned meaning of the term), are those who are “givers,” those who leave the corners of their fields for the poor gleaners. Those who, in modern times, give a portion of their periodic incomes to the church or other organizations so that the funds can be distributed to those who would, in olden times, be bent over gleaning from the field. In our modern day, some who are “givers” may have once been gleaners, and some who are now gleaners may have at one time been givers. Circumstances change for individuals as well as for families over the period of our life on earth. A person should never be too proud to glean when necessary. A giver should always be as generous as possible knowing that one day he or she may have to glean. Whether we glean or give, may we always appreciate the beauty of the golden/white fields of grain that provide us with bread and sustenance for life. May the God of us all, bless us as gleaners and givers and that we may live together in peace and harmony.