Mark challenged us to continue the study of ‘in between’ stages by doing some homework. The task we were given (our mission, if we choose to accept it!) is to read and study Numbers 33 throughout this week, looking at this chapter which details the stages in Israel’s journey from Egypt in the wilderness, to find out:
1) what God did for Israel
2) the different stages they went through on their forty-year journey
3) the ‘highs’ and ‘lows’ of that long journey
Once that is done, he urged us to do a similar exercise for our own lives, looking at all that God has done for us since we became Christians, noting the different stages we have gone through and the ‘highs’ and the ‘lows’.
It’s easy for us to feel that ‘nothing is happening at the moment’ or even to feel that ‘nothing ever happens’ in our lives. Sometimes, on a journey, progress seems achingly slow: think of all those holiday journeys when you’ve been stuck on a windy road behind a tractor and there’s no way of passing them or those journeys on unfamiliar roads when you’re looking for a particular landmark and you have to move so slowly for fear of missing it that that ‘mile and a half’ on the directions seems to go on forever. Sometimes it’s only when we take the time to stop and reflect that we actually see the progress we have made. We are not who we once were; we are not yet what we are going to be, for God is still at work in us. We are ‘works in progress’ and though we may feel the progress (in our own lives, in our church, in our families etc.) is slower than we would like it to be, we do well to pause and reflect on how far we have come.
We also celebrated a birthday:
