What was it like?

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What was it like?


What was it like to be pregnant and due to have a child in the times of Pharaoh? In the times when Pharaoh had given orders to have all the baby boys birthed to the Hebrew women thrown into the Nile? It was safe to have a girl child, those weren't snatched away and so rapidly slaughtered; but the boys..........


What, I wonder, was that like?


Did they dread the news of pregnancy? No doubt panic set in from the moment they knew that they were with child. Fear, like none that I can imagine, had to flood the mind like no other time. Did they spend their days and nights praying, "Please Lord, let this child that I'm carrying be a girl. I  cannot bare for it to be ripped away from me and drowned after carrying it for so long. Lord, please, I don't know how I could stand it." ?? 


Were there prayers like that?


In a time and day in culture when boys were the choice gender to give birth to.... that season of time had changed the choices, I'm sure, of so many of the women.


It takes a lot out of you to have a babe in your womb. Yet, even the hardness and challenging moments of the pregnancy endears you toward that child inside. Even the throes and thrashing of the labor does the same. Pain seeks its reward. Pain searches for purpose. Pain demands a reason. And seeing that precious babe's face for the very first time, makes the excruciatingness of the pain an even greater exuberance of joy. And yet, in this day, even that was ripped away. The anguishing look of the mom just after birth, sweat drenching her hair and beading on her face, her eyes in anguish in that first few seconds of not knowing.......................... Then the mere whisper (even if not spoken verbally, shown on the face), "What is it?"


"It's a ______________." What was the sex that they longed for?


"It's a girl!" Surely exhaled breaths that had been held was expelled with a relief that can't be measured. Perhaps, "it's a boy" wasn't even spoken.... but instead sorrowed eyes were made more furrowed and sorrowed with a slight shake of the head from the sadness of the knowing.


How horrid! What was that like?


Then, seeing moms that you'd seen growing a belly for months walking the streets with empty arms in horrified reality and mourning...... What if you'd been pregnant too, at the same time, and you now carried a female infant, while the other mom carried none.... Or vice versa. What horror! What an absolutely ferocious time to live in.


Can you imagine the emptiness on the streets that showed for years and years and years until that whole generation was no more. Only girl children playing girl games and doing girl things and girl chores.... with no boy children throwing rocks and sticks and learning how to wield a bow or a sword. No little boy toddler's feet following their father's footsteps. No little boys being circumcised or presented to the priest for purification. 


If they had school in their day as we do in ours, can you imagine those schools years filled with chairs of one gender? Can you imagine the weirdness in the lack of guys in the seats? It was an everyday everywhere constant reminder of what had been done.  


What was that like?


And then.... in all that..... there was Moses. "Drawn out"... as his name means.... but "what exactly for?" I'm sure he wondered. And again, everywhere he went in all that he did, he was consciously aware of what had happened in his loneness. No boys to play with his very same age........................No men of his nationality his same age when he grew older.....................?


What was that like?


And then again, it happened again.... this time in Jesus' day.


What was it like?..... What was it like so lonely in its realness?


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