One Year Bible: May 6

And when she rose up to glean, Boaz commanded his young men, saying, “Let her glean even among the sheaves, and do not reproach her. Also let grain from the bundles fall purposely for her; leave it that she may glean, and do not rebuke her.”

Ruth 2:14-16

To read today’s portion of scripture, you can purchase The One Year Bible or find the following in your Bible:

Ruth 2:1-4:22
John 4:43-54
Psalm 105:16-36
Proverbs 14:26-27

Many years back, while gathering background information for a book I had been commissioned to write, I began to have serious doubts about my ability to cover the topic. I hadn’t experienced it myself and had to rely instead on a multitude of interviews from people who had all been there at the beginning. But one thought kept badgering me: I don’t know what I don’t know … so what if I leave out something that should be included?

That thought pestered me constantly, and began to erode my confidence. And then one day when I happened to be reading Ruth in my quiet time, I set it down just as I had come to the verses quoted above, and my thoughts began to drift again to my fear of all the wonderful stories I was probably missing, all because I hadn’t been there myself.

In the middle of this, the phone rang. It was my friend, Mike Macy, who has since gone to be with the Lord. But at this time, he was in Nepal ministering to the people there.

One thing I always loved about Mike was that even if I hadn’t talked to him in many months, he always started our phone calls as if we had been in the middle of a conversation and had been cut off. No “hello.” No “This is Mike.” No surface talk. Just straight to the point.

”Hello,” I said when I answered the phone.

”So I’ve got an audience with the Dalai Lama next week,” Mike says. “And I’m going to tell him Jesus loves him.”

We spent fifteen or twenty minutes talking about how all that transpired, and he promised to call back after their conversation and tell me all about it. (He did tell the Dalai Lama that Jesus loved him, and he said later that the DL took it well, asked him a few questions about Jesus, and said that others had told him the same thing.)

As I was hanging up the phone, I laughed and thought, What a perfect story. I’ll include that in the section on the current state of the movement.

I started jotting notes and shaking my head at Mike’s crazy life, and feeling very thankful that he’d thought to call and tell me about this new adventure, and my glance fell down at the Bible next to me on the couch.

…let grain from the bundles fall purposely for her; leave it that she may glean …

And suddenly my fear of not having what I needed to finish the book vanished. Because suddenly, I saw what my gracious, merciful, compassionate God had done, and what He would continue to do. He had just dropped grain for me to gather.