Gathering the Gleanings: Reflections on Life in the Ministry

The words gather and gleaning have been in my vocabulary for what seems like my whole life. However, I’m not sure I used them figuratively or literally until I went off to Seminary in 1995.

While a young person certainly I collected plenty of things – stamps, quarters, my little ponies, crayons, markers and plenty of school/office supplies and oh I loved my collection of greeting cards (truth be told I still have a habit of collecting office supplies, crayons and greeting cards). I picked up plenty of things. Many hours of my life I spent picking up those things I collected. In fact I think I spent more time picking them up then I did playing with them. I picked up babysitting jobs and I picked up their toys. I was a church nerd so I picked up bulletins after worship and communion cups also and picked up scattered Bibles. So I was very familiar with these concepts.

Gathering and gleaning have similar meanings and entail comparable actions. However, I would never have given those words much thought (unless a thesaurus suggested them to me for a college paper), until the summer of 1996 and into the fall of that year.

I was in seminary and a requirement for ordination in the Moravian Church was the completion (and successful completion at that) of a Biblical language and Exegesis. Well the Class of 1998 was blessed to have to take Biblical Hebrew. So those hot months of June, July and August I spent hours each day attempting to memorize the Hebrew alphabet and learn vocabulary. So in the fall, I could translate the book of Ruth from Hebrew into English. During those 6 months or so, I quickly learnt about gleaning.

This post is an opportunity for me to relive this portion of my seminary education and be reminded of a few of the gleanings from Ruth the Moabite. Ruth was a widow and chose to stay close to her mother in law Naomi. Naomi had to relocate and travel back to her home land of Bethlehem, because she had lost her husband and two sons. And in Biblical times it took a husband or male child to make a way. So her only hope was to go back to her homeland and along went Ruth.

From Ruth I learnt a lot about gleaning. Ruth spent countless hours gleaning from the fields so she and Naomi would have something to live off of, even if it were the left overs in the field after the harvesters had done their days work. Scholars debate Ruth’s intent of primarily gleaning from the field of Boaz – and honestly I thought I left their debates behind me after my Hebrew Exegesis final presentation. I had NO intent of deeply engaging Ruth’s gleaning again at this level.

One should never say never, correct? Several years into my ministry I was asked to write a Bible Study Booklet for the Women’s Fellowships in the North and South on…..yup the Book of Ruth. Here we go gleaning again.

Fast forward, as I pondered the creation of this blog I thought about this other major writing project of my ministry and thought nope, not having anything to do with that word. Let’s stick with collecting and picking up.

Yet it makes sense to talk about gathering the gleanings – in that order. I’ve listened to many types of stories, studied Biblical stories and gleaned much from them, I feared I would lose the depths of their means and the intensity of the sacred ground that I was found standing on if I didn’t have means to gather those gleanings or even snippets of them.

My gathering tool wasn’t my hands picking up sheaves of leftover wheat rather a pen and a journal and latter my laptop and a journaling app. Along with some pictures and Bible Verse clippings.

Likewise, my dissertation became a gathering of gleanings of the lives of people I’d been with, books I had read, interviews I conducted, people I’d talked to and passion that grew within me.

Moravians have a tradition of tradition of gathering the gleanings of one’s spiritual journey in what’s known as a person’s lebenslauf.

All that said I believe we each need to find ways that help us gather the multitude of gleanings we encounter and experience throughout our lives. That’s another dream behind this blog: to have a place to continue to gather and share my gleanings with you and you with me.