Barely a month after God brought Israel out of Egypt, the people were already grumbling about the food (Exodus 16:3). A year later they were still at it. They had made bricks under Egyptian whips while Pharaoh ordered their newborn sons thrown into the Nile. God had split the sea to get them out. And what did they remember about Egypt? “We remember the fish we ate in Egypt that cost nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic” (Numbers 11:5).
They missed the cucumbers.
We’d laugh if we didn’t recognize ourselves. We remember the cucumbers and forget the whip. Ask a man who quit smoking what he misses, and he’ll talk about the smoke break with the guys out back and the way the first drag in the morning settled his nerves. He leaves out the cough. Drinking works the same way. We remember the laughter around the table and how a couple of beers took the edge off a long week. We forget the weight around the middle, the stairs that leave us short of breath, the foggy mornings, the slow wear on a body that used to bounce back, and the years it took off our lives.
Old relationships and draining jobs get the same treatment. We remember how easy the old relationship felt and somehow forget the fights. A man misses the big paycheck and forgets how little he saw his kids during those sixty-hour weeks.
Missing Egypt is human. Going back is a choice, and plenty of us make it, because familiar trouble has one thing going for it. We already know how to survive it. Freedom asks us to surrender control and trust someone else for tomorrow’s bread, and most of us would rather not. There’s an old saying that it took one night to get Israel out of Egypt and forty years in the desert to get Egypt out of Israel.
God took the long way
My family teases me about my GPS, and my son leads the charge. I use it everywhere I go, including places I’ve driven a hundred times. I don’t bother memorizing phone numbers or directions anymore, because my phone remembers them for me. All my GPS cares about is the fastest route.
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If Moses had owned my phone, it would have sent Israel straight up the coast through Philistine country, the quickest road from Egypt to Canaan. God paid no attention to the fastest route. He sent them the long way saying, “Lest the people change their minds when they see war and return to Egypt” (Exodus 13:17). God knew about the cucumbers before they did.
God led his people into the wilderness, the one place where they could not feed themselves. They had no fields to plant and no market to visit. Each morning they woke up hungry and looked to God for bread and water.
