WHEN NOTHING IS HAPPENING
Exodus 2
“During that long period, the king of Egypt died. The Israelites groaned in their slavery and cried out, and their cry for help because of their slavery went up to God.”
Many of us would have realised that life consists of long stretches of time when seemingly little of significance is achieved. When you think about it you might come to realise that God has designed life in this way.
A huge part of our life is spent asleep. Yet it is a time when we are completely unaware of what is happening. When we plant a seed it may take weeks before a shoot appears and perhaps years before we taste the fruit of the tree. When we were young we went to school. After many years we work and we get married. It takes nearly a year before a child is born into the world and many more years to develop into an adult.
A lot of life is lived waiting and we must learn to live while we wait. We must not put life on hold or let it get away from us.
While we are more aware of, and value more, the times of change, what we need to realise is that the potential of the change before us depends on the incremental development that takes place almost invisibly in these periods when seemingly nothing is happening, like the fact that the Israelites were gathering strength in numbers.
Moses accepted his new life in Midian and embraced his new family. He completely let go of Egypt and all the ambitions and possibilities that he must surely have harboured as he grew up, and left little room for regrets. Did he still care about his people? I believe so, as he was ready to return after his own doubts were sufficiently assuaged. But in the meantime he embraced the life that God gave him and accepted his new identity as a foreigner in a foreign land—a man with no baggage.
We are not told about the growth in Moses during this period of quiet but when God called he did not falter in his faith.
What the bible clearly assures us is that in periods when there is nothing we can do except to live on, God remains involved with us. He is faithful to himself and thus to us. Our response must be to engage with him in prayer even as we do our best with the circumstances that we are in.
“God heard their groaning and he remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac and with Jacob. So God looked on the Israelites and was concerned about them.”