God Remembered

We have read our own word into his. When we remember, we mean we located something too late: the birthday at eleven at night. Filing, and a small shame. Hearing that word here, we have been doing arithmetic against God for years. This long, and he had not thought of us.

And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. The Hebrew is not about retrieval. When God remembers in these books something moves next, in the same sentence. God remembered Noah, and every living thing, and all the cattle that was with him in the ark: and God made a wind to pass over the earth, and the waters asswaged. The remembering starts the action, and it is never the end of a lapse.

Then count the delay. It came to pass in process of time, that the king of Egypt died, and the slavery had been running for generations before that. Moses is in Midian and will be eighty before he goes back. Four verbs land in two verses: heard, remembered, looked, had respect. God says it himself later, in the first person: I have also heard the groaning of the children of Israel.

So the years were never the measurement, and we have spent ours using them as one. We have told other people God has not forgotten them while keeping our own count running, and both came out of a word that means something else in his mouth.

Nothing here needs working out. The groaning in Egypt was not an argument, and nobody was asked to phrase it better. Say none of it for a minute. That covenant was older than anybody's trouble in Egypt.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 136 is Goodness and Mercy (Psalm 23:6).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna, Year Two