Faith in Principles
March 06, 2025
Protection, trust, cooperation, fellowship and other principles can help guide your direction when the future looks uncertain.
Living up to the Gleaner motto “Prudens futuri” (“Thoughtful for the future”) can be tricky. Instead of planning, it’s easy to end up worrying, especially in uncertain times. What do we rely on when we don’t know what the future will bring? Christians ultimately place our faith in God and the Bible’s wisdom, so what does it tell us?
Fortunately, just like variables in a math problem, there are orderly ways to help make sense of uncertainty. The first three steps are similar: simplify, identify variables, then separate them from the “constants” — the things we know. We also have “constants” in everyday life, things we believe are trustworthy. These constants are worth exploring in 2025.
Principles are one type of constants. Three famous principles in the Bible are “faith, hope, and love” (the last sometimes translated as “charity”). Similar principles — “benevolence, protection, and fraternity” — have helped guide the Gleaner Society for 130 years.
Protection is found in large goals, but also smaller ones such as a recent Give and Grow project by Ohio police officer David Schweinhagen of the Fayette Police Department. Schweinhagen, a 30-year veteran police officer, attended training classes last May to become a bicycle patrolman. The class increased his awareness of bike safety. “I noticed a lot of kids in our small village did not have helmets,” he said. Looking for funding, he heard about Gleaner Life donations. Gleaners in Metamora, Ohio, helped connect Schweinhagen with South Fairfield Arbor (OH) member Dennis Richardson. They applied for a Give and Grow project to purchase bike helmets, then advertised their availability. Fayette police gave out 25 helmets at a fall festival to children accompanied by a parent — a good way to teach safety and to protect young lives.
Cooperation is another principle, and Gleaner founders saw it as the best way to attain benevolence, protection, and fraternity. “Cooperation is the golden key to success in every worldly endeavor,” stated one of the early Gleaner manuals. “As individuals, our strength is small; through cooperation our strength is multiplied, and together we are able to accomplish that which alone we cannot do.” A recent example saw Eagle Arbor (PA) host the Freya Barragan Paintball Fundraiser to help purchase a service dog for a 2-year-old girl with Dravet syndrome (see the item under Arbors in Action).
Trust can be difficult but, as author Stephen R. Covey said, it “is the glue of life. … It’s the foundational principle that holds all relationships.” We tend to cooperate and work with others as much as we trust them based on our limited knowledge. It may be easier to trust based on 130 years of evidence than on 30 seconds of interaction, but this principle is part of our call to love regardless of how we feel.
Fraternity likewise takes several forms. We find it in monthly meetings sharing lunch, helping with a community chili cook-off, organizing bingo games at a nursing home, or honoring local volunteers. Yet it goes much deeper. It is a sense of unity between individuals, regardless of differences, as if they were literally part of the same family. It is the desire to “love our neighbor as we love ourselves.”
Roots of faith help us trust in godly principles, even during uncertain seasons. They become constants for growth. Visit www.gleanerlife.org/giving-back/arbors to find more about arbors, or www.gleanerlife.org/giveandgrow to learn more about Give and Grow project grants. Let us help you put your principles into practice!