“Grrrr”-umbling or Trusting?

Lessons from the OT book of Exodus. Children have a hard time processing time. They invariably ask “When? or Are we there yet?” They are not unique. Take the life of Moses and the Israelites from Exodus. Waiting is harder than hard.

When we ask children to do a task they often respond just like Moses (and us if we are frank.) God calls us to His work and we say: I can’t, I can’t. I can’t! Moses said: I can’t speak eloquently; send someone else or why me? God wanted Moses to trust He would equip him but no amount of persuading make him say ok. For Moses, God gave him his brother Aaron to walk beside him. For us, He has given us the Holy Spirit.

Forty yrs. had passed and we find Moses sharing God’s plan to release the Israelites from slavery and the people bowed in reverence forgetting to ask: when will this happen. And so when the sticky-wicket Pharaoh exclaimed:  “I don’t know the Lord!” they were dumbfounded to hear not deliverance but: slave masters increase the workload of the Israelites!

They said: What happened to our deliverance? “You have made us stink in the opinion of Pharaoh and his servants!”  Like us, they had a mindset that it would happen right then and when it didn’t, they complained. Moses wasn’t much better at hearing this news either. “Lord, why have you caused trouble for these people? You have not rescued them!”

When things don’t go as we think they should, we find ourselves wallowing in the pit of grumbling. The Israelites and Moses fell into that trap and we do as well because we are an instant gratification people.

There is an important lesson here for us to teach our children: God does not work on our timetable! He only asks us to trust in Him with all of our heart and not rely on our own understanding. How are we doing?