Gleaning

When I was a boy, my Granny Whitely had a former hired hand who moved from West Virginia to Maryland.  Hyder Chapman got a job working for a wealthy man in Perryman, Maryland.  Hyder mowed, raked leaves, cut trees, and kept up the maintenance on Mr. Damison’s fifty-acre estate.  Once a month or so, Granny would visit Hyder to clean his house, and she would take us boys with her.  We liked to explore the woods behind Hyder’s little cottage.  On the way to his house, we drove by Mitchell’s corn fields.  Mitchell’s corn was huge operation with hundreds of acres of corn and a cannery on site.  They were famous for their white-kernelled “shoe-peg” sweet corn.  And there was an interesting unwritten rule at Mitchell’s fields: After the combines had harvested the corn, the local folk could pick up any ears of corn that was left on the ground.  For free!  Hey, that’s how Ruth and Naomi were able to survive three thousand years ago!  In Ruth 2:2, “And Ruth the Moabitess said unto Naomi, Let me now go to the field, and glean ears of corn after him in whose sight I shall find grace. And she said unto her, Go, my daughter.”  God took care of the poor widows in Israel, and God took care of my Granny Whitely in 1961!  Hey, God will take care of you too!