#BlogExodus 1: Believing

Belief.
It had to carry us so far.
Imagine...being a slave for as long as your family can remember...and then one day being told that you're going to be redeemed. By an unseen God. That you barely remember.

Now imagine being told that you're escaping...that freedom is on the horizon.

To believe that you will be saved is one thing. To actually experience it is another.
And to be thwarted almost immediately by the waters stretched before you? It's almost more than one can bear.

But the story of Nachshon....ah, now there's a story of belief.
Did he believe in God? Did he believe in freedom?
Did he believe in the strength of his own will?

Yes.

And as the story goes, he stepped one foot into the water, and then a few more steps and a few more, until the water was rising higher and higher around him...and just as the water was about to swallow him up, this newly-former slave who so firmly believed in freedom that he was willing to drown for it, just then...the waters parted.

Did he make it happen? Did Nachshon believe God into doing something?

Or did God finally begin to believe in us?

When Nachshon stepped forward, when his belief in the truth that freedom was far preferable to slavery finally came fully into being, perhaps then God believed that yes, this people would be able to cast off those burdens. Yes, those people would be able to become the great nation that would stand at Sinai.

Bumps in the road? Sure.
But God could see that the potential for belief was in us.

God redeemed us from Egypt. But it was a two-way partnership.
Once we believed it to be so, the partnering was real.


Want to play along? We're sharing #BlogExodus for the next 2 weeks. All you have to do is use the hashtag and there are suggested prompts on the graphic above (feel free to grab it). Maybe you just want to post on your Facebook or Twitter about these topics...or maybe you want to try #Exodusgram, a new idea to post photos related to these themes? I'll be posting my #blogExodus posts here, at this blog, my #Exodusgram pictures on my tumblr site, imabima.tumblr.com, and other miscellaneous Passover posts over at imabima.blogspot.com. It's going to be a busy fortnight!