Day 1 - Issue 23
Exodus 16:3 NLT
“If only the Lord had killed us back in Egypt,” they moaned. “There we sat around pots filled with meat and ate all the bread we wanted. But now you have brought us into this wilderness to starve us all to death.”
For me, learning to drive was both traumatic and taxing. To this day I remember “mirror, signal, manoeuvre”. The importance of the rear-view mirror was stressed continually. In fact, my instructor would ask as we drove, “What’s the colour of the car behind you?” or “What make is the car behind you?” If I hesitated or attempted a sly glance into the mirror, he was highly critical of what he termed “my overall road awareness”.
Here Israel has rather too much focus on the rear-view mirror as they criticise Moses for having brought them from a slavish, yet reliable, routine into the uncertainty of wilderness living. Their separation anxiety was high; their confidence in their leader limited. The ultimate orchestrater of their circumstance, God, was unimpressed with this desire to live out of their rear-view mirror. This whole generation, apart from Caleb and Joshua, never progressed beyond the wilderness, never experienced the Promised Land.
As we get older there is a temptation to dwell on the ‘good old days’. People regularly compare the present unfavourably with the past. We so easily romanticise what has been and use the rose-tinted, variable-focused view to colour our observation and subsequently our experience of the present. Like the Israelites, those who live looking back over their shoulders may only ever experience the wilderness in their encounter with God.
Most often, looking ahead can fill our hearts with anxiety. Ageing bodies make us aware of our mortality, discovering the abandonment many older people feel in old age, and the trauma of identifying a means to maintain dignity at an affordable price forces us to think as consumers. Like the Israelites, we feel what we knew before offered us greater security than what we see ahead of us. Here we have to find the courage to trust God and press ahead.
QUESTION: Will you hold onto the past, or will you focus on the road ahead?
PRAYER: Lord, I know focusing on the past robs me of my future. Instead help me this day to live with and for you.
