Today's Scripture Reading (November 13, 2024): Exodus 13
During my senior year in high
school, I spent the last class of the day doing "Work Experience."
For me, that meant working for a veterinarian. It was probably one of the more
unusual work experience projects of which I have heard. I had moved from an
urban city to a rural town a year earlier. The learning curve of rural life was
already high, but it was about to escalate. Working for a veterinarian, I spent
long hours going out to farms and ranches in the area. I was only supposed to
be working for the duration of that last period of school, but when you were
out doing house calls with the vet, you didn't come back to the town until he
did. Sometimes, that meant that you didn't get home until around midnight.
I did many things I had never
done before during that school semester. And I admit that I was way out of my
comfort zone; after all, I was really still a city boy. I had to learn things
that someone who had grown up in the area knew from childhood.
One of the most challenging
times began in the dead of winter. It was calving season, and in the area in
which I was living, the calving season ran from January to March. It was cold
and miserable; complications for the cattle seemed to be high, and so was the
mortality rate. I asked the vet I worked with one day why calving season
started so early. His response was blunt. Starting the calving season in
January was risky, but the rewards were also great. The calves that were born
in January, early in calving season, had the most brutal beginning to their
lives, but those that survived this beginning were also strong and would be
worth the most money when the cattle went to market later in the year. A higher
percentage of the calves born later in the season would survive, but they would
also bring in significantly less money. And so, every calf we worked to save in
January was important and well worth our effort to the rancher.
As a result, we went out into
the fields in January during freezing weather to save newborn calves and their
mothers. Some cows were stuck in the middle of the fields and couldn't be
brought into a place of shelter from the elements until we had taken care of
whatever the problem might have been.
After the plague of the
firstborn had moved through Egypt, killing the firstborn sons of the Egyptians
and their animals, God demanded that Israel consecrate the firstborn to him.
The word consecrate could mean sacrifice or simply to consider them to belong
to God. In practice, this consecration has taken different forms throughout the
Bible. The animals were most often sacrificed, even though the firstborn would
have been worth more than any of the animals born later. Firstborn sons were considered
to belong to God or bought back (redeemed) through the sacrifice of another
animal.
However, in some cases, these
sons were actually given to God. An example of this would be the Prophet
Samuel. The firstborn of his mother, Hannah, she literally gave her child to
God.
After
he was weaned, she took the boy with her, young as he was, along with a
three-year-old bull, an ephah of flour and a skin of wine, and brought him
to the house of the Lord at Shiloh. When the bull
had been sacrificed, they brought the boy to Eli, and
she said to him, "Pardon me, my lord. As surely as you live, I am the
woman who stood here beside you praying to the Lord. I prayed for this child, and
the Lord has granted me what I asked of him. So now I give him to the Lord. For his
whole life he will be given over to the Lord." And he worshiped the Lord there
(1 Samuel 1:24-28).
Tomorrow's Scripture Reading:
Exodus 14
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