I was already feeling emotionally and physically exhausted. It felt like I had run an entire marathon only to look around and find myself back at the starting line. Then Tipsy hurt her eye. We had to wake up throughout the night for a few weeks to doctor it and the exhaustion was piling on. To add to the chaos two other horses got hurt and needed doctoring. The more worn thin I got, the more life would throw punches. The things in my life that required patience seemed to need attention, the things that would make me angry seemed to be popping up all at once, and the things that would cause me to be anxious were knocking loudly at my door.
I was a little aggravated with God… I know it is pointless to be, but I’ve learned He can handle my feelings when I bring them to Him (honestly, where better to take them?). Why would I have already run through all of this once and felt like I healed a lot of things only to be confronted with all of it again?
One day during all of this I was scrolling Tik Tok and had two different messages come through about the Israelites being delivered from Egypt. One of the ladies said,
“God is saying, ‘It is one thing for Me to get you out of Egypt, but it is a whole other thing to get Egypt out of you’”.
Well, that stopped me in my tracks. Here I was angry about feeling like I was going through the same things over and over again, but I was missing the huge changes God had made in me over the last couple years. I was too busy staring at the desert I was in to see that God had brought me out of captivity. I had made huge strides in healing. This time I was turning to Jesus with whatever I was facing, rather than immediately turning to my old coping mechanisms. The things that would have completely wrecked me, sent me into a panic attack, caused me to find a way to disassociate, to people please or seek affirmation from the world… Those things weren’t impacting me the same anymore. I was out of Egypt, and God was helping me deal with the Egypt that was left in me.
I won’t lie - the old trauma responses were trying to resurface. The enemy was coming at me with everything in his arsenal to convince me that, even though I was out of captivity, I would never really be free. What better way to convince someone to turn around and walk right back into the old? Sometimes the thing we know, no matter how not good for us it is, seems safer than the growth and change that lies ahead.
It made me reevaluate the way I viewed the Israelites. They wandered in the desert for what seemed like forever. They saw the Red Sea part, they saw food come from the sky and water come from a rock, but time after time their desire to question God and go back to the old kept creeping back in.
Egypt was still in them - that feeling of captivity, the trauma, the belief that good was never coming, believing their ways were better, wondering if God was going to do it - all of it was still there. At one point while Moses was gone on a mountain to commune with GOD, the Israelites decided to build an idol to worship (Exodus 32) - which makes me wonder how many times I have been guilty of turning to earthly idols when I don’t immediately see God in my situation. Now instead of judging the Israelites in the desert, I was a little humbled by how often I have been quick to forget who God is and what He has done for me. We get to see the same pattern play out over and over again in most of the Old Testament.
God was trying to get them to the promised land and Egypt couldn’t come with them, but to the Israelites, they were trying to bring their old ways into the new. I think that captivity mindset sneaks up on us more often than we even realize.
I’ve noticed when life comes knocking, it is so easy to want to fall back into old patterns, sins, and coping mechanisms. I still have a few pieces of the old that come back up way too often, but I am remembering that the old can’t come with me into the new. Walking with God and trying to live for Him, even when it is hard, is so much better than anything Egypt could ever offer.