Daily Lesson for May 13, 2014

Today's Daily Lesson is from Exodus 32 verse 21:

"And Moses said to Aaron, 'What did this people do to you that you have brought such a great sin upon them?'"

The Israelites were making their way through the wilderness.  Moses went up the mountain to be with the LORD while his brother stayed with the people down in the valley below.  Moses tarried and the people became anxious, thinking perhaps Moses had been killed atop the mountain.  They began to wonder if they too might not die in this wilderness.  Soon enough, they were face to face with Aaron, demanding that he do something.  "Make us gods who will go before us," they said.  Aaron responded to their demands by telling them to throw their gold jewelry into the fire; he then took the smelted gold and made an idol calf of it.

That was when Moses came back down the mountain and could not believe what he saw.  "What did this people do to you?" he asked Aaron.

What do your anxieties do to you?  For me, the loss of control and the pressure to perform can lead to spiritually lethal situations. As a leader, when things are beyond my control I get anxious and I get desperate.  I lash outward or I lash inward.  I either cast blame or I take it.  I am willing to do whatever someone suggests I need to do to fix things. Usually that is something that releases the tension in the immediate time, but is often something destructive to the community in the long run.  Like Aaron, I feel responsible for whatever situation we might be in, and when I don't have the answers I feel shame - like I don't quite match up to the wilds of the wilderness.  So I make a golden calf - something, anything I can handle so as to feel like I'm in control.

The lesson of the wilderness is that we are not in control.  There are things in life way beyond our ability to shape, manipulate, and "handle".  There are some things we simply cannot escape.  It is when we come to see and accept this - when we come to hold space and live with the tension of our and others' anxieties - that we learn to wait for and trust that we really have and are enough to make it through.