There is help available to her and she will not take it.
Not because she is proud, exactly, though there is some of that and she would admit it if you pushed. It is more particular than pride.
She will not take a thing that has not been specifically handed to her, by name.
If somebody says anyone who needs a lift, just say, she does not say. If a notice goes up saying the room is open on Thursdays for whoever wants it, she reads it and does not go. If a friend says call me any time, she never calls, because any time is not the same as being asked at a particular time about a particular thing.
She is seventy-two and she has lived like this since she was a girl in a house where you did not take what you were not given.
And I want to be careful about that house, because it taught her a great deal that was good, and the same rule that has cost her so much also made her somebody people trust with their keys.
But it has left her sitting in a cold room on Thursdays.
Because the room is open, and it is warm, and the notice does say whoever wants it, and nobody has ever come round and said her name.
So let me ask you.
What is standing there for you that you will not take because nobody said your name?
The corners were standing there by law
There is a provision in the law about harvest that I have loved since I was young, and it is the quietest kind of generosity there is.
When you reap your field, you do not reap to the edge. You leave the corners. You do not go back for what you dropped.
It is not charity, in the sense of a decision anybody makes on the day. It is a standing arrangement, built into how the field is cut, every year, whether or not anybody turns up.
And then a woman arrives in that country with nothing, and here is what she says to her mother-in-law.
And Ruth the Moabite said to Naomi, Let me go to the fields and pick up the leftover grain behind anyone in whose eyes I find favor.Ruth 2:2
She does not send word to anybody. She does not wait to be invited by a landowner she has never met. She says let me go, and she goes, and she starts picking.
Ruth 2 has a foreigner with no standing walking into somebody else's field and taking what the law had already left for her, and the Spirit who gave that law wrote the corners in years before she was born, so what is standing there for you has never needed a second offer with your name on it.
Now, plain talk.
Your house taught you not to take what you were not given, and that is a good rule about somebody else's property, and I would not undo it in a woman of seventy-two.
The corners are not somebody else's property. That is the whole design. They were cut that way on purpose so that a person could come and take without asking, and the taking was not a favor granted, it was the field working as intended.
Ruth 2 records a woman doing exactly that on her first day in the country, and the Spirit was in the standing arrangement, which means the warm room on a Thursday is a corner and you have been reading it as a gift you have not been offered.
Now, here is the turn, and it is small and it is yours to take.
Take the corner.
Not because somebody has come and offered it to you personally, and not because you have earned it or because things have got bad enough to justify it. Take it because it is standing there and it was left standing for whoever came.
Ruth 2 shows a woman with no standing walking into a field and beginning, and the Spirit had written those corners into the law before she was born, so the thing you keep waiting to be handed has been waiting for you instead.
Nobody is going to come round and say your name. That is not a failure of anybody's kindness. It is how a corner works.
Declare this over yourself
Say these where you can hear yourself. Know what holds them up. This authority is not yours by nature, it is Christ's, and in Christ it has been given to you, so you speak as one representing the King. And you speak under His will, never over it. However He answers, and in whatever way He comes, the outcome is His.
- Permission, you were already given and I have spent seventy years waiting to be handed you again. Ruth 2 has a woman with no standing walking into a field and picking, and the corners had been left standing by law before she arrived.
- Rule from a house that taught me not to take what I was not given, you are good about somebody else's property and you have kept me in a cold room on Thursdays, and in the name of Jesus you are put in your place. The Spirit wrote those corners into the harvest years before anybody needed them.
- Lord, Ruth 2 says let me go to the fields, and she said it before she had met one landowner in that country. I am going somewhere open today without telling anybody, and the corner was cut for whoever came.
Ruth 2:2
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