Exodus. Perspective.

The miracles in Exodus are so much more than we tend to notice. The plagues on Egypt were powerful miracles. However, even more so, the miracles started and stopped when Moses said and only involved those intended. Each detail involved another layer of miracle. Pharaoh cried about the frogs and asked that they be stopped. Moses said when. Pharaoh said tomorrow. Moses said okay, and that is when the frogs died and stopped. The plague of frogs was a miracle, as was the time it started and the time it stopped.

Manna was an amazing miracle. Food dropped from heaven to feed the more than million people traveling through the wilderness. More amazing was that you couldn’t keep it overnight without it rotting and providing worms – except on the night before the sabbath. Manna fell every day but the sabbath. Those who gathered too much had enough for their meals, and those who didn’t gather enough had no lack.  There was so much more to each miracle than what we typically consider the miracle.  One omer of manna was kept as a testimony, and it never went bad. The manna was provided forty years until they arrived where food was abundant. Then, it suddenly stopped and never happened again.

Here is the question: How much more goes in to everything God does for us than we first see or consider?

God set me free from alcohol. That was the smallest part of the miracle. I was given compassion for the people I had betrayed and misused due to the drinking, which was a bigger miracle. I began to build honest relationships and found the people around me generously giving me far more than I had tried to manipulate out of them while I was drinking, a bigger miracle. I found that the reduction in lying made sleeping easier and the oppression of living much less. The doorway to work opened, and I had become reliable enough to keep the job, another miracle. The list could go on and on. I’ve been clean and dry for decades, and my gratitude has only broadened and deepened for all the work that went in to that portion of my clean up and restoration. God’s way works.

Sometimes it is easy to be superficial about the miracles in our lives. It is easy to forget how much work must go into laying a foundation so a bridge between past and future can be built. It is easy to forget how many obstacles have to be overcome to do something which appears so simple on the surface. It is easy to say I will buy a car until you try to. Then you learn about loans, insurance, payment plans, legal paperwork, and so much more. Nothing is as simple as we want it to be.

God never loses or forgets a prayer. He moves mountains in lives to build the bridges and the tracks to get us to a better life in Him. His life works. It is simpler to trust Him than it is to rely on an oversimplistic perspective. It is always a good day to count our miracles and blessings to build trust in the One who is trustworthy. He does so much more than we typically see.