I have always loved the exodus story despite its
contradictions. Why did God have to harden Pharaohs heart and make it so hard
to let the Hebrews go? And why did God have to make it so gruesome at the end,
with killing all the Egyptian first borns while smearing the blood of dead
lambs on the Jewish door posts to protect them? And why did the Jew wander for
40 years around the desert? Oh, right because like all men, Moses couldn’t stop
and ask for directions. Passover is a time of new creation, a time of
remembering the struggle of our past and being delivered into a new land. How
many of us here long to be renewed, to a new you, a new creation and a new land
of love and opportunity?
I remember with
heartache my own failures, when I lost my marriage, my first business, and I
believe for a time, my sanity. My best friend was a bartender. I was not at all
worthy of being around. Then a friend of
mine, a truck driver invited me to travel with him on his 18 wheeler for a few
days. As we headed across the open road I could feel the weight of my misery
growing lighter. He was a Christian, in the best sense of the word, a
recovering alcoholic, and a man who wore his sorrow on his face. He told me as
the miles fell under our wheels of such desperate times as driving his rig
blind drunken down the Rockies hoping he
would die. Until the day he almost did. His brakes gave out and the runaway
ramp was miles away. As the adrenaline pumped into his body he prayed. God,
spare me this and I will give my life over to love. Somehow he managed to get
to the runaway ramp but he was doing over 80 miles an hour with 60,000 pounds
at his back. He hit the ramp fishtailed in the gravel and stopped inches before
the end. That runaway ramp proved to be his promised land. He was good to his
promise, got sober, fell in love, married, had four kids and went looking for
sorry cases like me to help them create a new life. He would tell me often that the exodus story
was his favorite, a reluctant prophet Moses once a prince of Egypt who led his
people out of bondage. Who doesn’t need to be led from bondage he asked me.
With his help I began to free myself from the misery, sell the business, move
back east, meet Francis, fall in love have a bunch of kids and follow my call
to ministry.
With Grace and Grit, John
