I Wonder If Moses Ever...

[clein]

I was struck by the line, "The desert is a place of death."

I've spent a day in the desert around Phoenix. We spent the afternoon climbing one of the mountains outside of town avoiding the cactus as much as possible. Somewhere in the back of my mind I imagined that the Exodus was sort of like that. Mildly hot days of some discomfort lived over and over again 14,600 times.

The truth is that the Exodus must have felt like an eternity of heat. Days stretching into years. The sun beating down in the day. The cold freeze of the nights. The months of drought. The hot wind, the bleak emptiness and then the Hamsin. All of that plus the slow dying of a whole generation.

Moses must have felt a bit like those shepherds watching the desert take their sheep. It had to have been hard and I wonder if Moses ever spent those cold nights laying awake second guessing himself – and God?