The pull back to Egypt
We wish we had died in Egypt
It does not take long. Weeks, maybe — barely past the parted sea, the water still drying on their sandals — and Israel is already homesick for slavery. We wish we had died in Egypt by the flesh-pots, they cry, where we sat and ate our fill of bread. Listen to what nostalgia does to the memory. It keeps the flesh-pots and quietly deletes the whips. By Numbers it has gotten even more vivid and more absurd: they remember the fish they ate for nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, the garlic — a slave's menu recalled as a feast. For nothing, they say, as though slavery were generosity, as though their masters had been feeding them out of love rather than working them to keep them strong. This is the strange power of the wilderness. It makes Egypt look good. The in-between place is so disorienting, so stripped of the old familiar fullness, that the mind goes hunting backward for comfort and finds it in the very bondage God just tore them out of. They are not lying, exactly. They really do remember the melons. They have simply forgotten the chains that came with them.
“We wish that we had died by the hand of the LORD in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the flesh-pots and ate our fill of bread; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.”
— Israel in the wilderness — Exodus 16:3 (WEB)
“We remember the fish, which we ate in Egypt for nothing; the cucumbers, and the melons, and the leeks, and the onions, and the garlic.”
The wilderness will do this to you. Somewhere in the disorientation — when the new thing has not arrived and the old thing is irretrievably gone — you will catch yourself idealizing the exact bondage God broke you out of. The old certainty that answered every question, even though it was answering them falsely. The old relationship that was killing you slowly, remembered now as warmth. The old self that was at least familiar, even if it was not free. Nostalgia is the wilderness talking, and the wilderness lies. It tells you Egypt was better. It was not. You are remembering the cucumbers and forgetting the chains. The test is simple and brutal: if you actually went back, you would not get the melons. You would get the whips again, because the melons were always the bait on the bondage. The way through an upheaval is forward, through the wilderness, hard as that is — not back into the house of slavery dressed up by memory as home. Do not trust the homesickness. It is pointing you toward Egypt, and Egypt is not where God is going.