Well... I Never!
By Rev. William Dohle
Life... is a wild journey! Life has a way of working out in the end. Never in the way we think it should and never in the way we expect. It might start out looking bad...terrible even...but God has a way of turning it all for good...in the strangest ways.
It almost seems sometimes that God has a wacky sense of humor!
My life I've certainly seen that to be true.
- In Seminary, we stayed at a motel on our way home...just a few miles away from where we'd eventually live for 5 years. Never once did I look south and think: "I want to live there..."
- I visited Montana when I was kid, drove up through Yellowstone park and everything. I remember standing outside the gate...never knowing that I'd live there five years as well.
- I flew into the Chicago airport going to a conference in college. I flew over prairies...never knowing that I'd be living south of there in Peoria some years later.
God just has some strange sense of humor.
Moses proves that true as well. Moses' mother, I imagine, never realized that placing her child in the reed ark would save her child for the future. She expected to never see him again. She expected him to die. And casting him on the waters isn't the bravest way to see your baby off.
She did it in faith. Never realizing what would happen to him from there. Never imagining that Pharaoh's daughter would rescue the baby from the reeds.
But there's more. The irony doesn't stop there! Pharaoh's daughter, seeing Moses was just an infant and would need a nursing mother, called, of all people, Moses' sister forward.
"Then his sister asked Pharaoh’s daughter, “Shall I go and get one of the Hebrew women to nurse the baby for you?”
“Yes, go,” she answered. So the girl went and got the baby’s mother. Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, “Take this baby and nurse him for me, and I will pay you.” So the woman took the baby and nursed him.
Did you hear the irony of it? Could you sense God's chuckle? Here Moses' mother was, expecting to lose her baby boy, and she ends up being asked to care for him. And even more than that! For being a mother to Moses, she's paid for her work!
Talk about crazy...and ironic! Never in her wildest dreams could she have imagined it would turn out that way. She expected a curse...but received a blessing. She expected death...and received life! She expected bad...but God works for good, and good God was doing. And that good included giving Moses back to his mother in a way that no one could have ever expected or anticipated!
God works in your life the very same surprising way! God is constantly turning our sorrow into joy, your tears into laughter, your death into life. It happens when an unexpected baby turns into the greatest blessing of the family. Or when being laid off at one place leads us to a better job. Or when even a death in the family brings peace.
These times happen often but can only be recognized in retrospect. At the time of stress, we can't see past our noses. We can't see the good being prepared for us. We wait, nervous and confused and frustrated and lost. We think life has no meaning. And then the marvelous new beginning unfolds before us. God's gift of the good appears. And our eyes are open to a whole new reality. A place where God is present for us, in Jesus Christ. A whole new adventure. God turns our tears into cries of joy, and our sorrow into laughter. And He does it all in Jesus Christ our Lord!
God give us the faith to wait for that marvelous new beginning and the eyes to see and recognize it when it appears before us. Amen.
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