Leaving Egypt.

 

I am a birthday person. As someone in my counseling group said tonight, “Loving your birthday is like self care – people really should celebrate the entire month!” Needless to say, I whole heartily agree with her opinion.

Now, I dont know that this is a widely known fact, but people have “Golden Birthdays.” Your Golden Birthday is when the age that you are turning matches the date that you were born (17 on April 17th for example). Your Golden Birthday is supposed to be a very special birthday, or at least an excuse to have an extra -umph in your birthday hoopla.

Even less commonly known are “Silver Birthdays.” This is simply you 25th birthday; the date that you are ushered into your quarter of a century. These birthdays also cause for greater celebration – celebrating the fact that you’ve survived childhood, made it mostly into adulthood, and that you are well on your way.

For a very few special people in the world, you get one day in your life that surpasses all the rest of your birthdays. If you were born on the 25th of any given month, you have your golden and silver birthday on the same day. Dear friends, I was born on October 25th. And I can tell you, I have have been excited to be 25 since I was old enough to figure out the colossal coincidence of my birthday.

So, as we are rounding the corner onto my big day (ok, so we really have 5 months, but we are over half way there!), I have begun to think about the reality of being 25. 

Twenty Five.

Looking over the course of my life, I wouldn’t tell you that I had an agenda. I wouldn’t have told you that I have a schedule. As organized (and arguably neurotic) as I am about planning, I have never sat down and planned out the events of my life. “Get married by 23, have a house by 24, pop out first kid by 26.” In fact, for the most part, I’d say that I have been pretty content to figure out my life events as they come at me.

But as I have begun to roll downhill to my 25th birthday, I have begun to look around at the scenery of my life at this point. And as I look at where I am in my life, my job, my growth and emotional development, I am completely caught off guard.As a six year old, dreaming about having a party on the 25th of October, with 25 candles in my cake and 25 people singing me happy birthday, I always imagined something a little different than this. I’d love to believe I didnt have an agenda, but as I am am coming closer and closer, I am realizing I DID.

I don’t think that I had specifics, but I know that I thought that I would be a little bit more settled than this. Maybe that I would be a little further and successful in my career. That I would be relatively emotionally stable, and dating someone seriously. I would MOST DEFINITELY have my own place by now. I didn’t have every detail etched in stone, but I know that I didnt think that it would look like this.

This week at church, we brushed upon an interesting point. In Exodus 16, we find the Israelites in the midst of a mess (What else is new?). They are lost in the desert. They are hungry. And they are pissed. We find them talking smack on Moses and Aaron – making accusations that they are frauds leading them into the desert to die. And the really interesting part is, they begin to dream about Egypt.

The whole Israelite community set out from Elim and came to the Desert of Sin, which is between Elim and Sinai, on the fifteenthday of the second month after they had come out of Egypt. 2 In the desert the whole community grumbled against Moses and Aaron. 3The Israelites said to them, “If only we had died by the LORD’shand in Egypt! There we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted, but you have brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death.”

Flip back a few chapters, and we all seems to remember the Israelites being in complete bondage – slaves, working 15 hour days without adequate supplies, while their families are starving, dying, and agonizing.  But that’s not what the memory looks like to the Israelites in that moment. In their minds, Egypt was the best days of their life – they remember meat,  parties, and relaxation.

  

Slavery?? …Naa… Egypt was more like this:

 

 

  Now I would laugh at them for so clearly being ….um…RETARDED… except for the part where I do the same thing. I look at my life, and dont see all the tick marks where I thought they’d be at this point in the game, and I realized that I’m a little irked by that. Even for my future, I have things that I want to happen a certain way. Read my blog from earlier last week and you know that it’s a dream of mine to get out of Orange Country; to live internationally and work overseas.

And as I’m sitting in church, it slowly begins to sink in…my schedule for my life is my Egypt. The check list that I thought I would have finished by my Golden Birthday is my Egypt. My dreams for my future are my Egypt. I have been freed from so much in the course of my life. The more that I have trusted God and walked with Him, the more crazy adventures, interesting stories, and wild desires have come. But still, I have the urge to turn around and long for the days where I called the shots, where I got to say what life was going to look like. “At 25 life will be…[fill in the blank].”

So it turns out that I don’t have much on the Isrealites. Leaving Egypt is harder than you think. I dont know that I am able to say “God I don’t care if we never go anywhere interesting. I dont care if we stay in Orange County. I dont care if we wander the desert for 40 years. I just want to be with you, no matter where you are. You are always withy me in a pillar of fire or a cloud, you give me manna and quails, and I’m cool with that.”

So, when is your next birthday? And what’s on the checklist before that day? Where is your Egypt?  Are you ok with your dreams looking more like desert than promise land? And, if you do find that you have managed to find you way out of Egypt and into contentment, … Can you please pass the map?