Gleaning & Grace: Finding God in the Ordinary Field

THE SECOND CHAPTER OF THE BOOK OF RUTH begins with two words that have carried the weight of whole theologies: she happened. Ruth happened to come to the field of Boaz. The narrative presents this as a coincidence. The reader, by now, knows better.
This second volume of our devotional journey takes you into the fields-into the middle movement of Ruth's story, where the work is ordinary and the grace is extraordinary and the two are impossible to separate. Here Ruth gleans. Here Boaz appears. Here the machinery of redemption begins to turn in the midst of an ordinary harvest morning. If the first volume was about departure and arrival, the second is about what happens when you finally get to work in the field God has provided-and about the extraordinary things that can unfold in the middle of an ordinary day.

The Book of Ruth's middle section (chapters 2 and 3) is where the great themes of hesed and redemption begin to take on practical flesh. Ruth goes to the field with nothing but her willingness to work and her commitment to her mother-in-law. She asks permission to glean-to pick up what the harvesters leave behind, a provision of the Mosaic law designed specifically for the poor, the widow, the foreigner, and the orphan. That she has to ask tells us something about the vulnerability of her position. That she receives not merely permission but abundance tells us something about the grace of God.