Grains of Sand

Pixabay Let the baby die. It would have been safer. Who knows what the punishment might have been for anyone trying to hide a child from nosy neighbours bent on carrying out the Pharaoh’s edit to destroy all the Hebrew male newborns? (Exodus 1:22) It would have been less stressful. I read this morning in an advice column about a mother who wondered what nice thing she could do for her neighbours to compensate them for the many sleepless nights they might have suffered listening to her crying child through the thin walls of their townhouse. Babies cry. Under normal circumstances that is stressful enough. But when the child’s life depends on silence, the stress levels rise exponentially. It would have been more convenient. After all these two parents already had two children. Another mouth to feed under slavery conditions—especially under these dangerous conditions—would make any parents wonder about the wisdom of trying to keep this child. But Jochebed and Amram, for so Moses’ paren...

Pixabay A few years ago I joined Ancestry.ca in order to track down and document my family's genealogical history. My mother's side wasn't hard, but Dad's was another story. My great-grandfather had worn out three wives on the farm and no one seemed to know what their names were, or anything about the children of the first two. Records were obscure—immigration authorities seemed to have a hard time with spelling many of the names of those coming from Europe back in the day. But in the course of searching out more recent family history I discovered some cousins that I had had never known, and about whom no one had ever spoken—two young boys in one family who had died young. Genealogies are interesting, revealing, and sometimes even important. So they were in the time of Christ. Matthew begins his gospel, a message particularly directed to the Jews, by reciting the genealogy of Christ in order to prove a direct line back to Abraham, the father of the nation (Matth...