Get help with directions
You’re an ace. I get it. You succeed with a brand new, complicated dessert recipe that includes using a welder’s torch. You assemble a 42-piece rocking chair while refs deliberate a controversial play during the football game you’re watching on TV. Being the good, safety-conscious citizen that you are, you install a NASA-inspired surveillance system at the host school while waiting for your kid to lace her cleats before soccer practice. You can do nearly anything by GLANCING at (not reading sequentially or belaboring) the directions. Directions that only come in Portuguese.
And you can’t speak or read Portuguese.
At least not yet.
But tomorrow is another day.
Yippee for you. Yes. Hooray. You’re the champ, the hero. We love you. Everyone loves you. To celebrate you, we’ll make you a congratulatory cake—with or likely without the use of a torch.
In Exodus 12, God gives Moses and Aaron twelve (I counted) directions on how to prepare a lamb or young goat for this Passover, this overnight event that will set into motion the liberation of the Israelite people from Egyptian slavery. Twelve steps. We can all do twelve steps, right? Even the most directionally-challenged of us can do that, right?
No. I don’t think so. For all you wizzes out there, and for you all klutzy, non-sequential people out there (like me), we can’t get this alone. We are not supposed to get this—or we cannot do this—alone. Instead, we have to have some conversation with our neighbor on at least one or two of these steps.
God could have made this prep easier. God could have made the process shorter. God didn’t. Why? God boggles (and maybe burdens) the Israelites with specific directions that are purposely open for interpretation so that the people had to talk with each other, learn from each other, and bond to each other. I believe God made the Passover directions what they were so that the community on the move would be stronger, tighter, and more dependent on each other.
What I just described is what church should be—the place where communities on the move hear God’s Word collectively and live out His love not independently but dependently not just with God, but with each other.
PRAYER: Let me see that I am to ask my neighbor in the pew or at the soccer field how we are to do what You ask—which is follow You. Amen.
Thank you. This came with perfect timing.
You’re the best! Peace.