Wandering and Wondering

The Treehouse: Conversations About God

We left the children of Israel in the early part of their 40 years (translation: a couple of generations) of wandering in the wilderness. As a kid, this part of the story called up images of hordes of people in long robes trudging around the desert, just walking and walking, moaning, kicking up a lot of dust, moaning some more.

In fact, it was more a time of solidifying a cohesive identity of a nomadic people — of getting organized around certain principles and beliefs, of what their beliefs required of them, of coming to agreement about how to get on together, and most of all about how to become one out of a sort of ragtag gathering-up of related folks (when you read “nation” think “ethnic or people group”).