I haven’t given any updates on my steps-to-becoming-a-missionary progress lately, have I? Let me put it here in a nutshell:
(If you’re having trouble reading the above, it’s either because I’m using invisible ink - quite clever considering this is a computer - or I didn’t write anything.)
I’d really like to let you believe it’s not the latter, but it wouldn’t be honest to tell you it’s the first.
Which is another way of saying I still don’t know what I’m doing.
I do have a very small something to say though. I was reading the end of the book of Joshua the other night. Joshua was reminding the Israelites of their history from God’s point of view. He started with Abraham and his son and his son’s sons, said something about Joseph’s family relocating to Egypt, and then God’s very next words were, “Then I sent Moses and Aaron.”
Whoa, I thought. Hold up, God. I think You’re forgetting something. Just a little thing. You know . . . slavery, oppression, misery, all that stuff. Four hundred years of it.
Four hundred years!
Don’t know about the rest of y’all, but I consider that a fairly significant amount of time. And Joshua doesn’t even mention it in his history lesson.
Four hundred years of God’s people living under the SILENCE of God.
A lot of people can live in 400 years. A lot of kids can scrape their knees. A lot of babies can be named. A lot of houses can start on fire, a lot of spouses can fight, a lot of role models can fail. A lot of people can die. I wonder how they’d feel being passed over. I bet 400 years didn’t feel like a break between verses for them.
“That’s a lot of heartache You just skipped over there, God,” I noted, somewhat piqued. If I were the history teacher, I would have done a better job of telling the class what actually happened.
It started to really bother me. Like God was voiding all the lives of all those people who had slaved away and helped their neighbors and burnt meals and gone outside without any shoes and gotten in arguments with their sisters. Almost like He was making their lives meaningless. They weren’t remembered. No one knows their names, their favorite colors, who they had a crush on in kindergarten, what they really wanted to be when they grew up . . . We don’t know what kind of slaves they were, who complained and who didn’t, if anyone sacrificed his life for somebody else. A few thousand years later, we don’t know anything.
Less than a hundred years after they lived, Joshua didn’t even mention them.
Were their lives meaningless?
Is mine?
