It’s a bad habit I have, I’ll admit, when it comes to books and movies. I love spoilers. I love to know how the story ends before I get to the ending. Sometimes I find the suspense of not knowing how the story will end just too much, and I have to flip to the end of the book or google the plot on the internet. Just to have the relief of knowing. I just seem to enjoy the story more when I know the ultimate ending and how it all comes together. So I’ll be honest, I struggled a bit when my husband grabbed my phone as I was looking up the ending during a movie and said, “No spoilers today.” The suspense was way more intense.
I feel the same about life as I do about books and movies. I want the spoilers. And I want a happy ending, if I’m honest. I want to know that it will all work out. And while I do ultimately know how God ends the story (see Revelation for more details), there are many twists and turns in my story, in my family’s stories, in the stories of those close to me where the suspense is intense. I really wish I knew how God was going to resolve these plot lines to get to the ultimate happy ending.
The waiting
The waiting stretches my faith. It provides opportunities for it to grow. Those suspenseful moments in the waiting require, once again, that I surrender the the story design and the plot line to God. In the intensity of the trial, to believe that God will ultimately bring all of these subplots together to His desired ending, even if I can’t see now how it all happens. To remember that God is still good. He is still trustworthy. He is still in control. He is still who He says He is. It turns my trust into action, when I must actually show that I trust Him, rather than just saying that I do. All of this is hard for me, especially when it comes to my children.
So, I have great admiration for this mama, who welcomed her little one into less than ideal life circumstances. Life was more than hard, and she already had a daughter and a son. I have to wonder if she spent those months leading up to the arrival of her third child praying for this baby to be a little girl. And when the time came to have her baby, she had a little baby boy. Did her heart sink? I can just imagine the questions going through her mind. Was this another prayer that God simply hadn’t heard? Why had he given her a baby that was supposed to be killed? For you see, the ruler of the land had ordered that all of the baby boys like hers be killed at birth. Perhaps this wasn’t the first baby boy she was faced with losing.
An act of surrender
So, she’s holding her newborn baby boy, and she makes this gutsy decision. She defies the royal decree to kill her baby, and she keeps him in hiding for three months. And when the time comes where she can’t keep him hidden anymore, she demonstrates an incredible amount of faith, probably mixed with desperation. She makes a little basket, waterproofs it, and then puts her baby into it and puts the basket into the river. This bold, desperate act is the best chance her baby has at living. It’s an act of surrendering her baby to a sovereign God.
And then God does this amazing thing. He gives her back her baby. You see, her gutsy move of defying the royal decree was part of something so much bigger than this mama’s vision for her baby’s future. She was thinking about his immediate survival. God was thinking about the deliverance of a people. And the rest of the story sounds like something out of a Disney movie. The baby is found in the river by a princess. The baby’s older sister had been watching, and asks the princess about getting help to take care of the baby, and she gets the baby’s own mother to care of him during these formative years.
I have to believe that this mama treasured those moments, those years with her little boy. That she taught him about the God who had preserved his life, in whom she had such faith. And then, five years later, she has to surrender him again, to a woman about whom she knows very little, who will assume the role as his mother from that point forward, and to God, who had already demonstrated he had a divine purpose for this boy’s life.
But we know the ending
What is remarkable to me is that we have the benefit of knowing how Moses’s story ends. We can read all about it in Exodus. But in those moments of surrender, in those moments of trust, in those moments of loss, Jochebed didn’t. She didn’t know how the story would unfold. And yet she chose to trust God anyway. She chose to trust God when her entire nation was crying out for generations, asking for deliverance that had yet to come. Psalm 9 verse 10 says “Those who know your name trust in you, for you, LORD, have never forsaken those who seek you.”
This story of Moses’s mother reminds me that God takes our offerings of faith, trust, and surrender in moments of pain, in circumstances that make us afraid, in times that makes our hearts break. He holds them in his hand, and he weaves together our fragile threads of faith into beautiful tapestry of a greater story of grace, love, and mercy. God used the faith of a mom to bring freedom to multitudes.
© 2018 Sara R Conley