This week's Theme: Gleanings and Leanings
Day 1: The Very Edges
Cake-making, in our house was a much anticipated delight. Reserved for special times—mainly Christmas and Easter—it was all the more thrilling for both its infrequency and the festivity it usually heralded.
My sister and I watched, fascinated, as our mother made magic with a wooden spoon—spinning great big globs of butter, sugar, and eventually eggs and vanilla, into a mixing bowl full of golden cake batter. We would look on impatiently as she spooned the batter into the prepared pans—waiting, waiting, impatiently, expectantly—waiting to "lick the bowl," or the spoon, whichever we could successfully jostle for.
But the bowl and the spoon were always somewhat of a let-down. Until the day Sister. B. came to bake cakes with Mom.
Sister B. and her family were members of our small church congregation, but we rarely saw them outside of church and church functions. They didn't live exactly close—about a fifteen-minute walk from our house—and work, schedules, and the routines of life and community usually took our families in different directions.
If I ever knew the reason Sister B. came to our house to bake that day, I've forgotten. But it was double magic as she and Mom set to mixing. And as always, my sister and I closely "supervised" right up to pan-fill time. Only, this time, when the bowl and spoon were ready to be handed over to our eager hands, we found not the usual slightly disappointing scant coating—but generous amounts of lickable, smooth, creamy batter.
It wasn't that Mom was stingy—in fact, she was known for her generosity! Yet, so intent was she on the end result, the cake—so guarded by habit against waste—that her focus was on baking batter, not eating it raw! But Sister B. laughingly dismissed her protests, and we ate batter to our heart's content that day.
Sister B.'s understanding of the importance of a little extra cake batter to two eager children points to a marvelous precept from Scripture. As the people of God prepared to settle in their new land, God gave them an important instruction for harvesting:
“‘When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Do not go over your vineyard a second time or pick up the grapes that have fallen. Leave them for the poor and the foreigner’” (Leviticus 19:9-10).
Our great, wonderful God who knows the depths of our hearts, knows all our leanings towards limits—understands our tendencies towards bowl-scraping, spoon-cleaning, and pan filling. He knows how easy it is for us to focus only on our own end results—maximizing yield, minimizing waste, turning out cakes—never fully seeing those waiting for gleanings from our fields of provision.
The God of source and of bounty sees the poor, the foreigner, the outcast and the marginalized on the perimeters of our plenty. They eagerly await the life-sustaining gleanings at the very edges of our field—the little that make no difference in our own hands, but is multiplied in His. He calls us to invite them into our harvests of wheat and barley, blueberries and peaches, oranges and bananas, figs and papayas.
And cake!
Comments