Exodus 17:1-7
After last week, is there any choice about what I would first pick? I am so like Israel here I don't know what else to say about it - a little too close to home. God starts something, I get going, and then suddenly something comes in the way. School, work, life, family - there are so many things competing for attention, and it can be hard to keep track. Even when I am convinced something is from God, it is so easy to get caught up in short-term thinking - a friend calls it "scarcity mindset" - that I see the waves and forget the end game isn't up to me. This leads me to wandering around berating God, or crying out to Him, or focusing on little details when the grand plan is just right there to see.
Why do I keep doing this? I have given it some thought, and I think I run into these categories most often.
Sometimes it is perspective - certainly for Israel it is no small thing for your children to be thirsty and hungry, and God doesn't need water so maybe it just hasn't come onto God's radar that it is important for us little people? So we beg and plead for what is, let's be honest, going to be provided for us in the course of God's provision. The Father cares for even the birds of the field; I see a lot more squirrels when I am walking, and yes, them too, even the bugs. Mosquitos come from a surfeit of water, Israel didn't even have to deal with them! We are taught to pray for our daily bread but also that is a thing that we can believe in God's faithfulness. This is not to say that God promises that we will always have food and water, and obviously people starve and dehydrate and freeze and so on; those are ways that we are called to support our fellows, obviously, and certainly things happen that we can't explain, and I don't mean to diminish it - but broad strokes those of us who are still around have had food and water when we needed it, even if not when we wanted it exactly.
Sometimes it is impatience - I can get excited (no really, I can) and then I want to skip past the boring parts - the waiting, the wondering, the hoping, all of which I absolutely hate and also I understand are important - and get to the end. The journey is important, though - not the most important, but Jesus could certainly have come and died on the cross right away, and instead he did the whole baby thing. Like, 30 years of his life, not wasted I guess but certainly not a lot coming down to us nowadays. I hate waiting! and yet here I am, doing just that, a little nervous and worried and uncomfortable in it - welcome to Lent. Poor Israel! 40 years, everyone dead. Talk about a wait.
Sometimes it is uncertainty - even if I am convinced that a thing is right, and let's be honest I am usually past this point once I'm doing something significant, I have an awful lot of doubt. Did I dream up this thing, and convince myself? Did I really hear God, in some way? Was it really the movement of the Spirit? Sure there's the Wesleyan Quadrilateral and of course there's the whole question of discerning, and that should have happened at the beginning of the thing - and it also happens throughout, and it often hits when there is some interruption. I think that is part of the process - of waiting, of perspective, and yes of being a little unsure of yourself, or at least yourself in light of God. God does not change, but we are not God and sometimes we make mistakes - but sometimes we don't. Poor Israel was deep in this - and moreso with the quail, later - where they doubted whether Moses, even after everything, was really God's messenger at all. I can absolutely sympathize.
You notice I didn't say faith? I think all of these things happen, even when our faith is sufficient - which it so often isn't - and it is important for us to experience them. I'm sure there are plenty of other categories and perhaps I'll jot down a few more in the next few weeks, but I think that covers my last week pretty well. What a life we are called to live!