Sunday Afternoon Musings
The Children of Israel
I love the Bible story of the children of Israel. I picture them gathering their families and their flocks before leaving Egypt. And I picture their exodus from bondage.
Not the dramatic movie version with music swelling and Moses raising his arms to part the Red Sea. Oh, I love The Ten Commandments and can probably picture Charlton Heston better than I can half the people from high school.
No, I picture the morning after they walked across the Red Sea on dry land. The morning after they stepped onto the opposite shore. The first morning they woke up free.
They had finally received the freedom they had waited for more than four centuries. The freedom they had petitioned God for. The freedom they could only imagine while living under Pharaoh’s iron fist.
And then what?
Nobody was telling them where to stand.
Nobody was assigning work.
Nobody was telling them what came next.
I used to think they were silly, ungrateful fools. But then I remembered the day after I graduated from high school and the summer that followed. I had spent thirteen years—including kindergarten—waiting for the day I would finally be free. The day I would become the pilot of my own plane. The first day of the rest of my life.
And for a while, freedom looked like staying up too late, eating cookies at midnight, and not worrying about an irritating curfew.
As a child, somebody else carried the weight of almost everything important. Food appeared. Bills got paid. Rules existed. Consequences were negotiated by people with fully formed frontal lobes while I stomped around dramatically, insisting nobody understood me.
And then one day, life happened.
I got freedom.
Now what?
Now I think I understand their wandering and their longing to go back.
Egypt was predictable.
I also found myself thinking about the fact that scripture calls them the children of Israel.
Not the adults of Israel.
Not the perfected saints of Israel.
Children.
There’s something tender there that teaches as much about Heavenly Father as it does about them.
Children wander.
Children complain.
Children forget.
Children learn slowly.
And Heavenly Father understands.
The promised land wasn’t the end of their journey. It was simply another stretch of road. They still faced fear and disappointment and uncertainty. They still had to live ordinary lives. But perhaps they had learned enough in the wilderness to handle what came next.
Truthfully, I doubt all of them stayed there emotionally anyway. Human beings seem to live in a constant state of movement. Forward and backward. Brave and frightened. Faithful and doubtful. Certain one moment and wandering again the next.
Maybe that’s the mortal experience.
Not arriving once and for all, but slowly becoming while moving between wilderness and promised land over and over again.
— Charlene