Sealed with a Tear
Sealed with a Tear
Exodus 2:9b-10
So the woman took the child and nursed him. When the child grew older, she brought him to Pharaoh’s daughter, and he became her son. She named him Moses, “Because,” she said, “I drew him out of the water.”
What thoughts must be running through Moses’ mind as he sits down as an older man to pen this deeply personal portion of Exodus? Ponder that with me, friend. At what point in Moses’ life did he re-unite with his birth mother? Did he have a relationship with her growing up? Did he drop by her little house once a week or once every couple of months whenever he was in the area? If so, did she express to him her anger that Pharaoh’s vicious edict had robbed her of the opportunity to raise him herself? Did she ever throw her arms around him and sob uncontrollably, telling him how the day she gave him up to another woman crushed her spirit? Did she relay to him how sad she’d get to see his face from the crowd, yet how thrilled she’d be to see him so alive and full of health? How she tossed and turned emotionally like a raft on a turbulent sea, going back and forth between pride and shame, joy and bitterness, courage and despair? Or is it possible that Moses didn’t really know her very well growing up—that this portion of the story was as much as mystery to him as it is to us—and it broke his heart that he couldn’t know more? I wonder if by the time he understood the enormity of her sacrifice, and by the time he’d seen firsthand the deliverance God brought through it, it was already too late to rush through her door and give her the ‘thank you’ her heroism deserved.
I’d like to think that if archeologists could ever uncover the original parchment of Exodus, the one Moses wrote by his own hand, they’d find portions like Exodus 2 filled with smeared ink and blotchy letters, because I don’t think that a man as godlike as Moses could’ve transcribed such a deeply personal account of his life without shedding a few tears along the way. Tears for the sacrifices he knew of, and tears for the ones he didn’t.