Living
Broken

Over forty years ago I had the privilege of sitting under the teaching ministry of Campbell McAlpine who referred to the ‘garlic and leeks’ as twelve inches of indigestion. Curious how phrases stick in our memories but his point was that the craving was not necessarily as accurate as the memory. Free? The rabble craving the past remembered only the momentary satisfaction of a full stomach and ignored the cost was living in slavery to the Egyptians.

But. I know that feeling, that ‘remembering’ the good stuff of my old life, memories that are quite selective but also quite seductive. How often do we begin the new life of agreeing with God but then let our minds, our desires and our practices wander back to our former life? Just as the rabble in our text gave rein to the strong cravings for what should have been left behind in Egypt, so many of us also give ourselves the freedom to revisit the past pleasures of former times. We see only the lack of selective comforts in our current moment and seek to return to the perceived comforts of the old life. Even though we have entered newness of life in God’s ways, we wander back to the comforts past. We see our new life as lacking the pleasures of the past, that ‘our strength is dried up,’ our resources limited when compared to the bounties of selective memories. We even may disdain God’s new provisions for this moment as with the rabble’s ‘there is nothing at all but this manna’ which God gave daily, freely, abundantly.

How quickly we let our minds and emotions go back to the familiar, the comforts of the past, the ways we coped with the pains of life in bondage. We are not that removed from the ‘rabble’ in our desires to reclaim the comforts of the former life rather than persist in the fullness of the new life in which God desires to lead us.