Killing Babies for Pharaoh (a Steve Orr Lectionary reflection)

When Puah and Shiphrah chose midwifery as a career, it's unlikely they had nation-building in mind.

Two ordinary women, Hebrew midwives during the time the Israelites sojourned in Egypt, suddenly found themselves standing before Pharaoh, the king of Egypt. As shocking as that event must have seemed, what came next had to have been worse: Pharaoh wanted them to murder every male Hebrew baby whose birth they attended! No doubt their lives seemed pretty ordinary up until then. Day in and day out, year in and year out, they delivered babies. But now they were faced with a dilemma: become murderers or risk their lives defying Pharaoh.

Who stands up to the most powerful man on the planet?

These two, that's who!

They opted to defy Pharaoh and just keep right on delivering male babies for their Hebrew neighbors. And that's how what was already, in many ways, a life of service, became even more important in the face of Pharaoh's death decree. Each new day, each new birth, added to the ones before, culminating into something I doubt either woman saw coming: a life in service to God. By continuing to help male Hebrew babies into this world, they jeopardized not only their livelihood, but their very lives! In time, because they feared God more than Pharaoh, God honored their lives ... He gave them families of their own.

How important was the choice these two women made? Eventually, Pharaoh ordered all his people to throw every male Hebrew baby into the Nile. Yet, over the years they were in Egypt, the descendants of Jacob grew from about 70 to about 600,000. At least some of that vast population was due to the choice Shiphrah and Puah made regarding how to spend their days.

I don't find anyone writing about our inner life, our place in creation, and the state of our spirits quite like Annie Dillard. Many of her writings —such as Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Holy the Firm, and, of course, The Writing Life— speak directly of real people living real lives ... rather than some idealized version of a God-follower. In The Writing Life, Annie Dillard says, "How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives."

It often comes as a shock to people that their day-in-day-out life is their life. It might not seem so in the moment, but what you do each day accumulates into your entire life. All of us long for things that are not part of our everyday lives —that's why many of us have bucket lists— but when all is totaled up, it is what we actually do, not what we long for, that becomes our life.

A tapestry is, at its most basics, a bunch of threads.

In First Things First, Roger and Rebecca Merrill join Steven Covey in applying The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People to time management. Their conclusion? Our time on this planet should be comprised of four main activities: "to live, to learn, to love, to leave a legacy." Shiphrah and Puah certainly did that ... and what a legacy. They used their time to build up the peoples who would become the nation of Israel.

Time management pioneer Alan Lakein famously taught that we should ask, "What is the best use of my time right now?" I believe we should be creating the building blocks of our lives, day by day, moment by moment, crafting them into a life worth living, because:

What we do each day becomes our life ... How we live each day becomes our legacy.

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READINGS FOR THE COMING WEEK
Proper 16 (21) (August 27, 2017)
http://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.edu/

Exodus 1:8-2:10
Psalm 124
Isaiah 51:1-6
Psalm 138
Romans 12:1-8
Matthew 16:13-20
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I hope you can join us Friday morning at Lectionary Breakfast. We still meet at 8:00 in the function room of the Waco "Egg and I" restaurant (it's around the back). Food, fellowship, scripture, laughter: LB ends about 9:00, but the glow lasts all day.

Enjoy the week!
Steve
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A different version of this reflection appear in August 2014 as "How We Spend Our Days."
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The entire quote from The Writing Life:
"How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living."