Title: Thankless Children
Author: Christopher B. Harbin
Text: Exodus 16:2-15
Giving thanks and offering complaints are alternate ways we respond to the circumstances of life, whether expected or unexpected. Being thankful often calls for more reflection on our part. Offering our complaints seems to require much less energy on our part. On the flip side, however, it often drains us emotionally much more than seeing life from a more positive perspective. Complaining is reactionary. What do we accomplish with complaining, especially if we are unprepared to be part of a solution? To give thanks invests energy towards strengthening a relationship. What does complaining accomplish?
As we saw in a previous passage, the time sequence in today's passage appears to jump around. This time that disjointedness comes from relaying what God told Moses, followed by how the people experienced the results of that message.
These people recently freed from bondage in Egypt found themselves free at last, but this freedom did not feel quite as they expected. It was like the dog finally catching hold of a car's tire and not knowing what to do with it. They wanted freedom, but that meant figuring out surviving in a completely new environment without the markets of Egypt, the means to buy food, and the need to feed a multitude without awaiting some future harvest of unplanted crops. This was buyer's remorse on steroids.
They'd been dropped off in a new land, but there was no culture or society into which they might integrate. The term we translate as wilderness is more appropriately an uncultivated land. It is where no one has established a way of living to support a significant population into the future. Suddenly, they were strangers in a land where there was seemingly nothing to gather or hunt. They were reduced to hunter-gatherers with no known available food sources. How were they going to survive in this new context where nothin ...
Author: Christopher B. Harbin
Text: Exodus 16:2-15
Giving thanks and offering complaints are alternate ways we respond to the circumstances of life, whether expected or unexpected. Being thankful often calls for more reflection on our part. Offering our complaints seems to require much less energy on our part. On the flip side, however, it often drains us emotionally much more than seeing life from a more positive perspective. Complaining is reactionary. What do we accomplish with complaining, especially if we are unprepared to be part of a solution? To give thanks invests energy towards strengthening a relationship. What does complaining accomplish?
As we saw in a previous passage, the time sequence in today's passage appears to jump around. This time that disjointedness comes from relaying what God told Moses, followed by how the people experienced the results of that message.
These people recently freed from bondage in Egypt found themselves free at last, but this freedom did not feel quite as they expected. It was like the dog finally catching hold of a car's tire and not knowing what to do with it. They wanted freedom, but that meant figuring out surviving in a completely new environment without the markets of Egypt, the means to buy food, and the need to feed a multitude without awaiting some future harvest of unplanted crops. This was buyer's remorse on steroids.
They'd been dropped off in a new land, but there was no culture or society into which they might integrate. The term we translate as wilderness is more appropriately an uncultivated land. It is where no one has established a way of living to support a significant population into the future. Suddenly, they were strangers in a land where there was seemingly nothing to gather or hunt. They were reduced to hunter-gatherers with no known available food sources. How were they going to survive in this new context where nothin ...
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