Snakes on a [wilderness] plain: thoughts on Numbers 21:4-9

Having a conversation with some colleagues about this passage, there was talk of whingeing in the wilderness. Familiarity with a text can be both a good and a bad thing! But this time, as I began to try to walk in some wilderness shoes, I found a community of fear and grief, a community of people who were reacting in the way that some do, in circumstances where life has been so utterly changed, and the Promised Land is both an unknown quantity, and an unknown distance. A community who want to believe in the God who has liberated them from Egypt, and yet, who find it so hard in the hot searing sun of the wilderness, when each step forward saps your energy... and then, have to contend with snakes on a wilderness plain.
And so, a reflection of sorts:

A tough love, this.

A tough love, this.

Wilderness wandering,
weary wondering:
‘are we nearly there yet?’

But they do not know where ‘there’ is.

What they do know is:
blasting heat by day,
surprising cold by night;
sand and stone,
occasional bones
bleached clean;
scavengers hovering,
picking off
the ones who fall behind.

No signs of life here,
only dust and death.
Is this their promised freedom?

And some grow nostalgic,
rewrite the past
as a glorious feast
of life.

Slowly
a creeping mutiny begins
in the arid landscape
of their hearts,
and moves outwards;
insinuates itself throughout the camp,
undermines the voice,
the vision,
that led them from slavery.

Hope seeps away
like sweat in the sun
and they are undone
by toxic murmuring.
New life slithers among them,
with a sting.

Stunned
from their misremembered past,
they cry out to heaven,
call upon the One
who brought them to this place,
this strange new freedom.

They are not a petulant people,
but traumatised
and afraid:
there will be wobbles
on the way
to the promised land.

Until then...
a tough love, this,
that removes one poison
through another.
           c.Nik Mac 2021