Monday, February 20, 2012

Day 51: Deuteronomy 1, 2 and 3


It takes eleven days to go from Horeb to Kadesh Barnea by the Mount Seir road. (Deuteronomy 1:2)

Just a parenthetical note, that's all. Apparently common knowledge – It takes eleven days to go from Horeb to Kadesh Barnea by the Mount Seir road. It was from Kadesh Barnea, the southern entrance to Canaan, the spies were dispatched to survey the Promised Land. It was at Kadesh Barnea the people balked at going in and taking what was rightfully theirs.

It takes stamina, determination and careful planning to squeeze an eleven-day journey into forty years.

The people who followed Moses out of Egypt were not prepared to follow him into Canaan – not once the cold reality of battle and hardship pierced the fog of their naive expectations. They were slaves, not soldiers, and they needed to grow up if they were ever to claim their inheritance.

There may be times in our lives when it seems things are taking longer than they should, when we take inventory of our lives and insist we should have come further and accomplished more. Rather than becoming frustrated, those are the times we need to remember that God alone knows how far we've really traveled and the battles we've fought to get from where we were to where we are now.

The straight-line distance from where we started to where we end up may not tell the whole story of how far we've come.

How's your journey going?

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