Thought for Today – Wednesday 25th March 2020
These are unprecedented times. We have never known life like this, where so much seems out of control and chaos is on such a grand scale. Perhaps, more than ever before, we are going to experience wilderness fatigue as we all go further into this crisis.
A couple of weeks ago, the Lectionary readings encouraged us to think about water. So far, the evidence is that in our universe water is a very rare commodity. Without water there is no life as we know it. Water and life go together. Numerous travellers, from the early explorers down to the present-day adventurers, have perished for lack of water. No water, no life.
A highly significant fact is that the aboriginal peoples of the world have always treasured and memorised every watering hole in their territories. This is particularly so in the dry inlands of Australia and Africa. From one generation to another, aboriginal people sing songs which are like maps of their territory; in these song-maps the precious water holes are prominent. In fact, in some areas of limestone country, the nomadic people will come to an apparently dry place and strike a rock with a club. Like a miracle, water will flow from the rock. And, of course, that places us very much in Moses’ territory.
I suspect that if we had been an explorer, dying of thirst, and we saw an aborigine bring water out of rock we would have seen it as a miracle. And maybe it would be a miracle. In the case of Moses, as a fugitive on the run from the Egyptian police, Moses had found himself in the desert of the Sinai Peninsula. It may have seemed like an accident to Moses that he ended up there, and fell in with the family of a wilderness sheikh named Jethro. Moses married the sheikh’s daughter. It may have seemed like an unfortunate necessity that Moses then had to spend his days in secret for forty years as a humble shepherd in a harsh territory.
However, unbeknown to Moses at the time, this territory was the very territory through which the Jewish slaves in Egypt would have to travel if they were ever to escape their bondage. Moses, though, was a part of an unfolding miracle. Without realising it, Moses was God’s apprentice for forty years in the desert country. During that long clandestine period
Moses learned its geography. He learned its sparse fruits and water holes. He became what the nomads of the world call, in their various languages, an experienced ‘bushman.’ Moses came to know how to surmount the desert threats to human existence. It seems very likely that Moses also came to know that sometimes water lay just behind a thin layer of limestone.
The real miracle, though, of the salvation of the Jewish people was that God had, over many years, trained a sinful, foolish man called Moses. Brought up like a prince, Moses received the best education in the courts of Pharaoh. He learned the skills of leadership, was educated in medicine and public hygiene. He was taught the science of his day: the movements of the stars and the art of navigation. He learned the strategies of warfare.
But then Moses seemed to spoil God’s plans by becoming a murderer on the run. But, as countless numbers of us have discovered, God’s plans are never completely outflanked. In the providence of God, the desert became Moses’ greatest school. In the desert Moses painfully and slowly learned about himself, about his strengths and about his limitations.
Speaking for ourselves, going forward into all the uncertainty of these times, whatever feelings or thoughts this crisis may drive you into, and however bleak things may get, the testimony of our scriptures and the Easter-experience of all the saints, is that God’s un-controlling Spirit is active in the accomplishing of God’s will.
Always remember: Underneath are the everlasting arms.