dar334

While sitting at the Cancer Center this morning while Opdivo was being infused into my husband through the port in his chest, I had my Kindle in hand, open to the book “Moses: A Man of Selfless Dedication” by Charles R. Swindoll. This book has been in my library for long time but I’ve neglected to read it. My intentions are always good, but I lack the follow through. Before the new year was under way, I made the decision to finish the projects I had started and spend less time trying to rescue the bears or spread the jelly. I needed to be productive.

Most of you will think of Moses as the man that God gave the Ten Commandments to or possibly the movie with Charlton Heston, but the Moses I am pondering is the infant that should have been thrown into the Nile upon his birth.

Moses was born during a time when the Hebrews were slaves in Egypt. Joseph had long been gone and the Hebrews were multiplying at a fast rate when the new pharaoh began to fear they would revolt and take over the land of Egypt. He sent word to the Hebrew midwives to kill the baby boys upon birth but let the girls live. When Moses was born his parents hid him for three months. When it became too difficult to hide him any longer, his Mother put him in a basket in the reeds of the Nile River and had his sister Mariam watched him. He wasn’t there long when the Pharaoh’s daughter and her servants came to the Nile so the princess could bathe. They heard the cries of baby Moses and plucked him out of the Nile. The princess fell in love with him and decided to keep him as her own. The problem was feeding him. Mariam quickly arrived on the scene and offered to find a Hebrew woman to nurse the baby …… and yes, his mother got to fill that position. She cared for him for a few years before ultimately, she had to give him back to the princess.

Now is where the “gene pool” comes in to play. A good majority of Moses’ life was lived in an elaborate home of the King of Egypt, as the son of the King’s daughter. Yet he watched “his” people, the Hebrews, being treated poorly and took it upon himself to show them kindness. Long story short, he killed an Egyptian that was beating one of the Hebrews and had to run for his life.

In my reading of the book his morning, the writer touches on the important role a mother plays in the development of her children. He speaks about a woman who had 19 children, Susanna Wesley. The fifteenth child born to her was named John. John Wesley was the one who spearheaded Methodism. His younger brother Charles wrote over eight thousand hymns. One of her strategies for rearing children was this: “When my child turns one year old, and some before then, he is taught to fear the rod and cry softly, by which he escapes an abundance of correction which he might otherwise have had.” Mr. Swindoll goes on to say that you can have all the faith in the world, but if you have no consistent plan for discipline, you run a circus, not a family. Now that little bleep from the book doesn’t factor in my ponder, but I see this, or the lack of this, every day in this world. It’s becoming a full fledged circus. Mr. Swindoll also writes about the importance of children being raised by their mother through their adolescent years if at all possible. He suggests giving up luxuries until your children are raised. The instruction book teaches that. Now before you get your pantyhose in a knot about teaching the fear of the rod, I started the discipline process as soon as the negative behavior started. I didn’t beat my kids, I didn’t draw blood or leave bruises, and child protective services never needed to be called, but they were taught consequences shortly after they started crawling. If they were smart enough to figure out how to crawl across the floor and snatch up something they shouldn’t snatch up, they got their chubby little hands slapped and were taken back out to the middle of the floor where the things they could snatch up were. It didn’t take long for them to figure out what “no” meant and what would happen if they disobeyed.

Now back to the gene pool. Several times in the Old Testament it’s written that God wanted certain groups of people “completely wiped out”. Don’t even spare the children. At first I thought this was brutal, but when you think about the genes you can see his point. There are tons of things that are passed on through genes, things that could never be taught or learned. I will use the example of fears. My husband has a fear of insects. The gene that produces this fear skipped a generation but reared it’s ugly head in our granddaughter. The fire engine red hair gene skipped myself and my siblings, it also skipped our children, but it fired up loud and clear in the great-grandchildren of the “gene”. Obesity, alcoholism, rage, can all be passed on through genes. God’s intention was to rid the earth of those negative gene carriers thus creating a world free from the bad genes. But it didn’t work because people didn’t obey.

The first time I had the privilege to study the life of Moses was in the Disciple Study. Moses had an uncanny softness in his heart for the Hebrews, although he was raised as an Egyptian. He should have despised them, hated them, mistreated them. But during the time in his life when he was most susceptible, a sponge if you will, his parents were filling him with their faith in the one and only God. He knew theses were his people and he cared for them. Little did he know that he would be the one to save them from their life of slavery and take them to the Promised Land. A land full of richness. The unfortunate part of his story is he doesn’t get to live in that land.

I hope I’ve given you the want, the want to open the instruction book and read about Moses.

Pondering on,

-dar