I was in high school when I noticed that a lady named Martha Stewart seemed to be popping up everywhere. Mama had one of her cookbooks, and she was a frequent guest on the morning shows I’d occasionally watch when I was getting ready for school. She also had a Christmas special on PBS, and I remember being utterly fascinated by her crisp East Coast accent along with her affinity for fresh cranberries.

I need to talk about those cranberries for just a second.

As a child of the Deep South, the existence of fresh cranberries was a wonder to me. Back in the ’80s it was unusual to see fresh cranberries in Mississippi grocery stores—we mostly bought Ocean Spray in a can—so watching Martha Stewart string cranberries and roll cranberries in sugar and grind cranberries for a vanilla ice cream topping was like stumbling across the customs of a strange and foreign land. Sometimes I couldn’t help but think of a line from the old “Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer” sketches on SNL: “Your world frightens and confuses me.”

There was one year, in fact, when Martha Stewart gave detailed instructions about how to spiral approximately four thousand cranberries (rough estimate, give or take) onto a Styrofoam wreath. Even at my young age I knew that was not going to be at the top of my list for whiling away a winter afternoon, especially after Martha Stewart said that the first step was to gather an obscene amount of toothpicks, break each one in half, and then one by one pierce the cranberries with a half toothpick.

Just thinking about it makes me feel faint.

And now that I’m in my forties, that cranberry wreath project is some version of my worst nightmare. Because do you know how much I could accomplish in the fourteen mind-numbing hours I’d spend breaking toothpicks and piercing cranberries and spiraling them around a Styrofoam wreath? I could fly halfway across the world, for heaven’s sake. Or I could watch over half of a season of Parenthood. Or I could drive to Target, buy a wreath, drive home, hang it up, and then have thirteen hours left over to do all sorts of glorious things like sleeping or frying chicken or pinning Pinterest recipes that I have no intention of actually cooking.

Also, do you know how long those cranberry wreaths supposedly lasted, according to Martha Stewart? A WEEK.

If I’m going to invest that much time into something, I’m pretty much going to need it to last until Jesus returns, give or take a couple of weeks.

Okay. I’m all done talking about the cranberries now. Clearly I have some feelings.

For the most part I could watch Martha Stewart share recipes and projects and elaborate instructions for wrapping a turkey in puff pastry and keep it all in perspective. As fascinated as I was by her creativity and attention to detail, I certainly didn’t harbor any deep desire to follow in her footsteps as a lifestyle expert (which, for the record, was a whole new thing in the late ’80s and something none of us knew we needed). Plus, I grew up surrounded by women who entertained effortlessly and beautifully, and I was much more drawn to their old-school vestiges of Southern hospitality than I was to Martha Stewart’s tutorials about the wonders of radicchio.

I mean, give me some iceberg lettuce slathered in Comeback Sauce any day of the week, you know?

After I got married, though, Martha Stewart’s tips and tricks and ideas resonated with me a whole lot more than when I was a teenager. Suddenly I found myself with my very own china, not to mention an assortment of crystal and flatware that would have made Emily Post proud, and I realized how much I liked setting a pretty table. Combine the staging and accessorizing with my love for cooking (which, by the way, I still love a whole lot), and I unknowingly started to buy into the crazy idea that when David and I invited people over, I didn’t just need to welcome them—I needed to entertain in such a way that, at the end of the evening, someone might be tempted to award me a gold medal in the Lifestyle Expert Competition.

The fact that said contest was completely imaginary didn’t slow me down even a little bit.

I was in it to win it, y’all.

Typically my pre-dinner preparations started several days in advance with some extensive dog-earing of the latest issues of Southern Living and Martha Stewart Living. I’m not even sure that I used very many of the ideas that I saw on those pages, but they for sure ramped up my inner expectations for how perfect everything needed to be. I spent lunchtime at work making the most detailed to-do lists you ever did see—things like “cut camellias for mint julep cups,” “plant new annuals in front flower bed,” and “make seasonal wreath for front door.”

No cranberries, though. I hadn’t actually lost my mind.

And it’s not that any of those things were bad, you understand. My heart just got so fixated on the externals—how pretty everything should look, how delicious my food should be, how clever it might be to make bud vases out of acorns—that I totally missed the internals. I wasn’t relaxed, I wasn’t ready to listen, and I certainly wasn’t ready to laugh because UPTIGHT MUCH, FRANCES?

Honestly, I wasn’t focused at all on our guests; I was consumed by everything I needed to do for the dinner. And oftentimes when people arrived at our house, I was totally preoccupied with Other, Very Important Matters because I was probably tweaking the magnolia branches running down the center of the table or re-folding napkins or FILLING OUT PLACE CARDS, FOR HEAVEN’S SAKE.

Because when you have four people over for dinner, it’s very important that you assign seats, my friends.

The fact that I was young and still figuring out what it meant to take care of our friends and family was probably part of the reason I fell into this pattern. There’s definitely a learning curve for practicing hospitality and caring for others, and on the front end, it’s easy to mix up our priorities.

And the bigger piece of the puzzle, at least for me, was that I way undervalued the impact of a simple, loving gesture. On some level I believed I had to set the most gorgeous table in the most beautifully decorated (and cleanest!) house in order for the actual meal (which, naturally, needed to be off-the-charts memorable) to count.

I watched my mama entertain all of my life, but somehow I’d missed what she’d known all along: genuine hospitality doesn’t have to be fancy, and it provides for folks in ways that go far deeper than giving them something to eat and drink. Because if I had to guess, I’d say lots of people walked away from my table feeling empty even if their stomachs were full. Sure, I never attempted one of those fresh cranberry wreaths like Martha Stewart made, but in retrospect I’m afraid that I busied myself with equally futile pursuits.

Even still, those magnolia branches were stunning as a centerpiece.

The camellias in the mint julep cups offset them beautifully.

(KIDDING.)

(Only I’m totally serious.)

The last time we saw Ruth and Naomi, they had just arrived back in Bethlehem. Naomi was trying to change her name to Mara since she said the Lord had dealt bitterly with her, and Ruth may or may not have been standing by her mother-in-law’s side and contemplating whether it would be rude to tell Naomi to take a chill pill.

To be clear, Scripture makes no mention of Ruth asking her mother-in-law to SIMMER DOWN for a second. All I’m saying is that Naomi was a little bit of a Debbie Downer—maybe just a hair shy of pulling out her Sad Trombone and playing a few notes—which was fair enough, I guess, considering everything she had endured.

But by the beginning of Ruth 2, our friends Naomi and Ruth were more settled. Ruth needed a job (or, as my sister would say, she needed a J.O.B.), and since it was barley harvest time, her plan was to see if she could glean after the reapers. That meant she wouldn’t be one of the main workers, but after the reapers gathered the majority of the crop (with the exception of the corners, which Levitical law forbade reapers to cut), the gleaners could go behind them and pick up whatever was dropped or left over. Those uncut corners, “one of the social assistance programs in Israel,”22 were theirs for the taking, as well.

As it turned out, Naomi’s late husband, Elimelech, happened to have a relative, Boaz, who was a landowner, and on her first day as a gleaner, Naomi happened to find her way to his land. Boaz happened to see her and asked one of his workers who she was. That worker happened to know about Ruth’s connection to Naomi, and he also happened to be able to testify to the fact that Ruth had worked her tail off that day.

In fairness, there’s no translation of the Bible that refers to someone working his or her tail off. But you get the idea.

And yes, that’s a whole lot of happenstance at the beginning of Ruth 2. If we didn’t know about, you know, the providential hand of God, we might be tempted to think Ruth benefitted from a series of coincidences, but the truth (and the Truth) of the matter is that the Lord was guiding her exactly where He wanted her, working out the details of Ruth’s life for her good and His glory.

There were all sorts of encouraging developments after Boaz learned Ruth’s identity, chief among which was his willingness to look at her vulnerability as a widow and a foreigner in his fields and essentially say, “Hey. I got this.” (Granted, Boaz didn’t share a vernacular with, for instance, Ryan Gosling, but his actions very much lined up with an “I got this” attitude.) He told Ruth to stick by the young women who worked for him, he assured her the young men wouldn’t bother her, and he invited her to drink freely from the water his young men provided. And then, after he blessed her for her faithfulness to her mother-in-law and asked the Lord to give her a full reward (v. 12), he offered her bread and wine when she sat down for lunchtime.

Boaz’s kindness didn’t stop there. He instructed his men to let Ruth glean among the sheaves, which meant she could take from the bundles of barley that had already been gathered. He also told them to “accidentally” drop some of what they were harvesting, knowing that she would pick it up as she gleaned behind them. And even though the events of the book of Ruth took place over a thousand years before a man named Paul wrote to the church at Ephesus, the spirit of Boaz’s actions and his generosity toward Ruth remind me of Paul’s words in the last part of Ephesians 3:20: “above and beyond all that we ask or think” (hcsb).

What strikes me the most, though, is how Ruth was able to bless and care for Naomi as a result of her gleaning. Our current culture would tell us that we have to go big or go home, that we have to be the chief and not the Indian, that we have to be the starter and not the backup. Whether we mean to or not, we sometimes send the message that we value flash over substance, that we prefer the spotlight over behind-the-scenes, that we crave fame over faithfulness.

Just look at our girl Ruth, though. She wasn’t on the front lines. She was a gleaner, not a reaper. She worked from morning until night at a job that was far from glamorous, and she did so without any expectation of advancement or preference or reward. As my aunt Chox would say, Ruth just got out there and got after it.

And when she went home after her first day’s work, she presented Naomi with far more than she could have imagined: an ephah of barley (almost five gallons)23 plus the leftovers from her lunch with Boaz.

To some people it might not have seemed like much at all, but it was an abundance of riches for a widowed foreigner and her mother-in-law.

And the harvest wasn’t over yet.

If I had to guess, I’d say a lot of us are putting some serious pressure on ourselves to be all things to all people.

WHOOOOOOA, Nellie, you’re probably thinking. I must have forgotten the part where I asked you to get all up in my business.

But I know what my life looks like. I know what my friends’ lives look like. And I think it’s safe to say that maybe—just maybe—we all need a nap. And perhaps a restorative massage.

Just last week, in fact, a friend of mine—I’ll call her Katherine—gave me the rundown of what she and her family had going on over a week-long span, and by the time she got to the end of the list, I felt like a cartoon character whose eyeballs had started to spin. Katherine works part-time, so in addition to the necessity of shuttling two kids to the week’s school and sports practices and dance lessons and doctor’s appointments and church activities, she also had a couple of after-hours job-related events that were nonnegotiable.

On top of that, she and her husband, who travels frequently for his job, were making a late-week out-of-state trip to celebrate an extended family member’s graduation, but they had to drive home early the following afternoon for their older child’s basketball doubleheader. On Sunday they wanted to carve out a tiny pocket of family fun somewhere in between going to church, singing in the choir, and attending small group—but Katherine said that most Sundays, when they finally stagger through the back door, they have just enough time to eat supper, wrap up any loose ends with the kids’ homework, coordinate schedules for the next week, and prepare to start the process all over again.

I told Katherine that her life makes me tired.

She said that was fine because my life makes her tired, too.

And if we’re honest, we’d have to say that many women feel like they’re drowning (or maybe juggling knives is a better description). It could be that they’re mamas taking care of their obligations in the midst of changing diapers or playing Chutes and Ladders for the 452nd time (be near, Lord) or coordinating the local elementary school’s Fall Festival despite the fact that they have spent the last eight years begging and pleading for a reprieve from the PTA leadership team, PLEASE, JESUS, MAKE IT SO.

And don’t even get me started about how much my homeschooling friends have on their proverbial plates. Suffice it to say that it’s enough to make lesser women (like myself, for example) pick up that overcrowded plate and sling its contents off the front porch before introducing said plate to the transformative power of a hammer.

(Come to think of it, maybe we all just need to pause right now and enter into a brief season of prayer on behalf of our homeschooling friends.)

(Because NO BREAKS, PEOPLE. NO BREAKS FROM THE PRECIOUS ANGEL CHILDREN.)

And listen. It’s the same deal if you’re single, if you’re kid-free, if you’re empty nesting, if you’re a Millennial, or if you’re a Baby Boomer.

Life is full.

So given all of that, there’s no doubt time is always precious—no matter what your season of life happens to be. But sometimes time seems flat-out scarce when you’re facing a seemingly endless rotation of responsibilities.

And for most women, whether we like it or not, there’s just not a whole lot of margin in the day-to-day.

So I think all of this fairly begs the question: Considering how full the day-to-day can be, where do we find extra hours so we can look out for each other? Take care of each other? Minister to each other?

I mean, if our families and our jobs and our etceteras demand so much of our time and energy, does that mean we’re supposed to put on blinders and ignore needs with our extended families and friends? Turn a blind eye to whatever is going on in our communities?

You know the answer as well as I do: of course not. I mean, every once in a while we may need to close ranks and circle the wagons when our families are working through something deeply personal or trying to heal from something deeply painful.

But more often than not—if we’re in healthy community and relationship—we’re going to walk through life with all sorts of folks. And I think we can take a hint from Ruth when we’re trying to find extra measures of both margin and provision.

So if you’re wondering, WHERE? WHERE DO I FIND THEM?

Well, the “where” is pretty simple.

Where else? In the gleaning.

When I was younger, I watched Mama and my aunt Chox take incredible care of their parents. They took them to their doctor’s appointments, stayed with them in the hospital, and helped them however they could. Chox worked full-time at their family business and Mama stayed at home (where she excelled at keeping the most gorgeous home you ever did see), so they tag-teamed to fit their schedules and did whatever Mamaw and Papaw needed them to do.

From my perspective, Mama and Chox handled their parents’ care in the most casual, effortless way. They just made a few phone calls, drove to the hospital every once in a while, and talked to doctors whenever it was necessary. Super simple. Not much to it.

Well.

Let’s just talk about that whole “casual, effortless” thing, shall we?

I mean, my goodness. The last few years have taught me some lessons about that. Cleared up some misconceptions, you might say. I think Sister and my cousin Paige would agree. Because as our mamas have gotten older, as they’ve faced various health challenges and endured more than we ever imagined they’d face, we’ve learned what a big job Mama and Chox had as they cared for Mamaw and Papaw.

That job is an honor.

But that job can also take a toll.

Paige was the first one of the three of us to walk that road. About ten years ago her daddy, our Uncle Joe, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and then a couple of years before he passed away, doctors diagnosed Chox with cancer. She’s done remarkably well considering that she’s been fighting to get better for six years, and if you asked her how she’s doing, she’d say, “Oh, I’m fine—just fine. There are other folks who have it way worse. Now what do you know good? Tell me something funny.”

More than anything else on earth, Chox loves to laugh. I appreciate that in a person.

If you pressed her, though, and asked her the worst part of her illness, she'd say, “those treatments”—and then she’d roll her eyes. She takes injections every few weeks, and while the injections have done a good job of stabilizing the cancer, they sometimes cause side effects. As my brother-in-law Barry would say, those side effects are a whole ’nother kettle of fish. Paige has pretty much whittled the timing of them down to a science, so whenever they hit hard, Paige takes her mama to the emergency room, sits with her through the night, stays until Chox gets moved to a room, and then runs to work for as many hours as she can before she goes back to the hospital to spend the night.

This is precisely why I ask Paige one question more than any other: “Are you getting any sleep?”

Paige never answers. She just laughs.

I don’t know exactly how many times Chox and Paige have repeated their side effects song and dance over the last six years, but let me put it this way: the side effects song and dance is, at the very least, old enough to vote. Around the fourth or fifth time it happened, I asked Paige if the hospital might let her have a garage door opener that she could push once she got in range of the emergency room—something that would automatically open doors, call for an orderly, and admit her mama. At the time we laughed at that idea, but since then they’ve been back so many times that the button just makes good sense. It’s a matter of efficiency.

So the hospital and Chox? They’re pretty familiar with each other.

Which means Paige and vinyl fold-out sofas are pretty familiar with each other, too.

As you can imagine, Chox and Paige would probably tell you that repeated hospital stays = Happy Fun Times but only if it’s Opposite Day. So it might seem weird when I tell you that when I think back on Paige’s stories about her trips to the hospital with Chox, I’m reminded of the power of gleaning.

(Seriously.)

(I’ll stop for just a second so that you can rub your neck in an attempt to alleviate the symptoms of the topical whiplash I just caused.)

(I have some Icy Hot in my purse if you need to borrow it.)

All righty.

Here’s the thing about the gleaning: we totally underestimate its value when we’re in the middle of something difficult. However, I am here to declare forever and for always that when tough times hit—and they will—GLEANING IS THE BOMB. Ruth could attest to that, couldn’t she? I mean, she and Naomi were in a tough spot, and Ruth had to work in the fields as a means of survival, and out of the leftovers of the harvest, all of Ruth and Naomi’s needs were richly supplied. Ruth faithfully gleaned, and they ended up with more than they needed.

In the case of Chox’s multiple hospital stays, gleaning has been oh-so-significant even though the gleaning had nothing to do with, say, barley. Instead gleaning has meant that friends and extended family members found leftover time in their very busy schedules to stop by, to text, or to call and say Hey, we see you. Hey, we love you. Hey, we’re praying for you.

Or even Hey, Paige, we’re going to bring you an Icee because we know that hospital has the heat cranked up to a temperature that rivals the surface of the sun, and an Icee will do wonders when you feel like you’re crawling through a thick cloud of hot.

Nobody has ever arrived at Chox’s hospital room door with a manual entitled Now I Will Solve All Your Problems. Nobody has camped out with Paige on the sofa bed in a dramatic show of solidarity (and even if they tried, Paige wouldn’t let them because those bed springs leave indentations on your liver, for heaven’s sake).

But Chox’s and Paige’s friends and family members glean like crazy. During what could be regarded as “throwaway” time—five minutes here, twenty minutes there—they glean on their behalf. They gather and harvest seemingly insignificant moments during those hospital visits to love and care for Chox. They drop off flowers, they make sure Chox has plenty of crushed ice in her water mug, they text to let Paige know they’re praying, they leave voice mails offering everything from food to pajamas (in the event that Chox and Paige are ill-prepared for a few nights of Hospital Camp). They keep Chox company, laugh with her, and sit by her bed so Paige can meet her husband for dinner or go to her son’s T-ball game. People glean the minutes that could easily be squandered or ignored.

And Paige would say that she will never forget how lavishly and generously the Lord has provided through their faithfulness.

Anyone who has spent time in a hospital knows that when you’re finally dismissed, you’re forever grateful for the front-line reapers—the doctors, the nurses, the lab techs—who dedicate considerable energy and resources to helping you or someone you love get better.

But from a purely relational perspective, do you know what will continue to inspire and encourage and comfort us when we look back on tough times?

The profound power and provision of the gleaning.

Ruth was on to something, y’all.

Chox and Paige will attest to that.

There are more than three thousand years between Ruth’s life in Bethlehem and our current twenty-first-century existence, and I’ll be the first to admit that sometimes it’s way easier to focus on our differences instead of our similarities.

For instance, Ruth couldn’t open a laptop and Google “stuck in foreign land with cranky mother-in-law” and find instant empathy on no fewer than forty-five message boards devoted to that specific topic. Ruth couldn’t throw on some shoes and walk to the closest Starbucks if she was craving a little “me time.”

Come to think of it, Ruth was probably wholly unfamiliar with the concept of “me time.”

Ruth couldn’t put on her headphones and crank up her iTunes if she wanted to block out the noise of the world. She couldn’t run by Kroger if she was iffy about what to fix for dinner. She couldn’t open her Netflix app and mindlessly watch every single episode of Friends or Gilmore Girls or The Office.

Given my lifelong affinity for television and all of its treasures, it is difficult for me to imagine a civilization where this was the reality. It is neither just nor fair. The mere fact that Ruth and her girlfriends never knew the joys of quoting Joey Tribbiani sort of makes me want to get back in the bed.

(Actually, it makes me want to say, “Hey Ruth—how YOU doin’?”)

For Ruth, there was no distraction from the immediacy of her needs. There was no escaping the realities of the very real pressures she and Naomi were facing. But as she gleaned, the Lord made a way. He didn’t just take care of the essential physical needs, either. Sure, Ruth gathered plenty of food for her and her mother-in-law. But she also enjoyed the friendship and companionship of other women—fellowship during long days that could have very easily become lonely. In addition to all of that, she found herself under the protection and guidance of a kind, godly man who was a loving leader.

This was the best-case scenario for Ruth. Because despite the differences that may come to mind when we think of twelfth century BC versus twenty-first century AD, here’s the big fat piece of cross-century, cross-generational common ground that almost all women share: we want to take really good care of our people. Ruth was able to do that.

And when we make our peace with the fact that we can only do what we can do—that we’re not made to be all things to all people—we start to see how the Lord multiplies our efforts. Granted, most of us aren’t working in a literal field like Naomi did, but we’re still working in the metaphorical fields the Lord has given us: our families, our churches, our neighborhoods, our schools, our workplaces, our volunteer organizations. If we’re mindful and faithful to glean a few minutes of margin from each day—the half-hour when we’re driving our kids home from school, the forty-minute window between football practice drop-off and pick-up, the five minutes it takes to detour by a friend’s house on the way home from work—we just may get to bear witness to the Lord providing supernatural abundance in the hearts and lives of the people we love.

Watch and see.

Isn’t this the best news? We can all stop feeling like we have to present a hurting friend with Martha Stewart’s cranberry wreath! We’re wasting our time with all those broken toothpicks! So instead, maybe we just look for ten minutes in our day when we can stop by her house with some cranberries. Or oranges. Or any fruit rich in vitamin C. Hug her neck. Tell her that we love her. Pray with her.

Because Ruth is our reminder that God richly provides in the gleaning.

Look at what my dear (pretend) friend Mary Elizabeth Baxter wrote back in the nineteenth century:

Ruth did not assume to be a reaper, but ONLY A GLEANER. There are some prominent workers in the harvest field who sweep hundreds into the fold. But there are also patient gleaners who teach in Sunday schools, who visit from house to house, who write letters to their acquaintances, who speak a word to those they travel with by the way. God bless these precious gleaners. They gather many an ear of corn which reapers pass by (emphasis mine).24

And if we still need one more reminder—one more assurance—then we’d do well to sing the words from an old hymn by Kittie Suffield called “Little Is Much When God Is in It.”

In the harvest field now ripened

There’s a work for all to do;

Hark! the voice of God is calling,

To the harvest calling you.

Little is much when God is in it!

Labor not for wealth or fame;

There’s a crown, and you can win it,

If you go in Jesus’ name.

In the mad rush of the broad way,

In the hurry and the strife,

Tell of Jesus’ love and mercy,

Give to them the Word of Life.

Does the place you’re called to labor

Seem so small and little known?

It is great if God is in it,

And He’ll not forget His own.25

Kittie knew what was up, y’all.

Glean on, my friends.

Glean on.