Egypt 2
Plunging Into the Unknown. For Sheloves Magazine.
He fought the urge to close his eyes and shut out the fear rising up in his chest. The salty smell of the sea overtook his senses as the chill hit his waist. The growing sound of the waves drowned out the gasps of the people watching in amazement. His own heartbeat roared in his ears as the water reached his shoulders. He held onto the promise that was his lifeline.
They had come this far, seen the hand of God leading them at every step. He remembered the blood-red Nile, the cries in the night when they huddled in their homes holding their own firstborn sons like their very grips on them would protect them. He looked back one last time at the thousands on the banks, watching him with wide eyes. He couldn’t see a way through the sea yet but the Miracle Worker who brought them here said to go. So, Nashon breathed one last deep breath before plunging headlong into the unknown.
***
I’ve been submerging myself in the words of Exodus these days, after several gentle nudges from God. A friend would mention stepping into the Red Sea before it parted as encouragement to keep the faith that all of the unknown in our lives right now is leading to a chance at greater obedience. The haunting words of an old Sara Groves song kept coming up in the shuffle of my playlist … “I’m caught between the promise and the things I know.” So, I returned to the old familiar stories of the Children of Israel whose entire lives were changing with every step they took towards the sea and all that lay beyond it.
In searching for what God was trying to show me, I read about Nashon for the first time. His name is one of those I have glossed over a dozen times in the Bible, one in a long list of names that have a place in God’s story that we only glimpse in passing. Nashon was brother-in-law to Aaron, one of the leaders of the tribe of Judah that left Egypt for the promise of God waiting beyond the sea. Mentioned again in the genealogy of Jesus in the New Testament, we learn that he was exactly halfway in the direct line from Judah and King David.
It is in the Midrash, the ancient Jewish commentary on the Hebrew scriptures, that we find the rest of Nashon’s story...
Living in the Shadow of a Wonder. For You Are Here Stories.
I was impressed by the monumental size of the stones, the mystery of how the ancients could build something so incredible. The sheer novelty of being next to such famous structures. But I tried to play it cool. We weren’t tourists; we had come to plant our lives in the Middle East.
We moved to Cairo at the end of summer with the heat still blazing down on us. We trekked through the unfamiliar streets to find grocery stores and vegetable stands, bakeries and shawarma stalls. We made at least four stops to get everything we needed for the week. Just running normal errands took every bit of effort my husband and I had as we explored our new city. Between the exhaustion from the heat and the mental strain of navigating life in a strange city, in a language we couldn’t yet understand — we were spent.
When friends offered to take us to the Pyramids, about half an hour from our new home, we welcomed the break from all of the practicalities.
Every photo I’d ever seen of the Pyramids showed these mammoth wonders of the world against a backdrop of breathtaking desert and not much else. Perhaps a camel or tourists looking like they were the size of ants would dot the base. But in pictures you get the impression that the Pyramids sit in the middle of an endless desert.
When we first spotted the famous landmarks, the peaks coming into view through the haze that seemed to hang in the air, every notion I had about the Pyramids changed.
Our car wove in and out of traffic. The honks were just friendly reminders that each car had to fight for space on the bumpy roads that transported twenty million people through the city. We rounded a bend and there they were—not in the middle of the desert but right in the heart of the bustling city. All those magnificent photos that are so famous are shot from the front of the Pyramids, with the Sphinx at the base.
But look from another angle and you will glimpse the complexities of life in this land—the ancient and the modern side by side. Wonders of the ancient world sit right next to the Pizza Hut…
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