God heard their groaning and he remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac and with Jacob. So God looked on the Israelites and was concerned about them. – Exodus 2:24-25

Today’s Scripture Reading (August 12, 2018): Exodus 2

Jack London in “The Star Rover,” a collection of short stories that revolve around the concept of reincarnation, says that “to be able to forget means sanity.” We are tortured enough by what we remember; sometimes there is a needed bliss in forgetting what has happened in our lives. Personally, I have a long list of experiences that I wish I could forget, moments and actions that I regret, and times of struggle that still seem to reassert themselves in my dreams. And the real problem with most of our bad memories is that there is absolutely nothing that we can do in the present to solve the problems of the past. What is locked away our the past we have no choice but to accept as an uncomfortable stage of our lives.

We would have no idea if Moses forgot his time in Egypt. But, possibly, the memory of the struggle that he had experienced in Egypt during the first third of his life began to recede. After all, Moses was convinced that there was nothing that he could do address the situation in Egypt. He could not unsee what he saw. And he definitely could not raise the Egyptian he had killed back to life. The first forty years of his life existed almost as the experiences of someone else. Once, he was a prince. But now his reality was that he was a shepherd, and there was nothing that he could do to become a prince again. And, if he is anything like me, he probably didn’t want to return to his royal life. He had built something else, something better, in the wilderness. He had a wife and children, and the respect of others who saw him as the Shepherd of Midian. He had become a fixture in the wilderness over the past four decades that he had lived there.

And so, as the years passed, Egypt receded. Moses probably never really forgot his previous life, but he likely tried not to obsess over a situation that he couldn’t change. Maybe, one day, God would raise a mighty warrior who would free his people from their oppression. But Moses was not that person. He might have been once, but now he was just an old shepherd.

But if the memory of the Hebrew people had receded in the mind of Moses, the descendants of Jacob were still front and center in the mind of God. He heard them cry, something that Moses probably also heard in his nightmares. He remembered the covenant that he had made with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, something of which Moses was also likely aware. And God had concern over them, something that Moses tried to forget because obsessing over the plight of the Hebrew people in Egypt could do nothing but bring Moses pain.

The difference was that the once mighty Moses was now powerless to change what he had left behind. But God had never left. And God still retained the power to bring his people home.

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Exodus 3