Unanticipated Blessings

 August 13, 2022

It can be hard when we’re in the middle of a crisis to see God’s hand in it. When you’re drowning is not the best time to have someone describing the beauty of a sunset on the water. In Exodus 1, Pharaoh had ordered all the baby Hebrew boys to be drowned. It was one of the earliest recorded instances of deliberate genocide.

In the middle of this situation, one desperate young woman gave birth to a healthy boy described as “beautiful.” Unwilling to hand him over to the authorities, she instead fashioned a basket out of reeds, daubed it with tar, put her baby in it, and placed it in the reeds by the river. It perhaps wasn’t the best of plans, but it was all she could manage under the circumstances. She chose a place near where Pharaoh’s daughter came to bathe, and had her young daughter stationed nearby as a lookout.

As hoped, Pharaoh’s daughter heard the baby crying and sent one of her attendants to see what was going on, whereupon the baby’s sister came out of hiding, offering to find a wet nurse for him. Pharaoh’s daughter agreed, and the sister ran home with the news. Having risked all to save him, Moses’ mother was now being paid to care for her own son by the daughter of the man who had ordered his death. You couldn’t make up a story with more irony than this!

I would bet when she first heard about Pharaoh’s decree, Moses’ mother was immediately thrown into a panic, perhaps even crying out, “Why, God? Where are you when we need you?” And all the while, God was quietly working, suggesting a pan in her mind, nudging her to act swiftly. All along, he had planned something better than she could have imagined. And he continues to do so today. The crisis is not the measure of God’s love and wisdom; it is only the means by which that love and wisdom are in time, revealed, if we are patient and faithful enough to refuse to let the crisis define us.