The Princess Diary

. . . She saw the basket among the reeds and sent her slave girl to get it. She opened it and saw the baby. He was crying and she felt sorry for him. “This is one of the Hebrew babies,” she said. (Exodus 2:6)

I have no idea if Pharaoh’s daughter kept a diary. This is a woman who took attendants with her when we she went to bathe in the Nile. Frankly, it doesn’t sound like she was accustomed to having much privacy. Recording the day’s events and her secret thoughts probably wasn’t high on the royal to-do list. Maybe someone was appointed to do that for her. The Bible doesn’t tell us so we’ll never know for sure. Still, I’ve been imagining what the princess diary might have looked like on the day she happened upon a Hebrew boy floating in the river.

Dear Diary,

Today I found a baby boy floating in a basket on the Nile. He’s a Hebrew baby, and a young Hebrew girl will help find a nurse maid who will care for him until he’s potty trained and can eat table food. Still working on a name – but since I took him out of the water I’m leaning towards “Moses.” Daddy will be thrilled!

There’s plenty that Pharaoh’s daughter could have written had she kept a diary. But there were so many other things happening in that event, things she could have never imagined. She had no way of knowing that this baby would grow to be the man who came back to Egypt to free the people her father was oppressing.

It’s one thing to describe an event. It’s something else entirely to interpret what that event means. Truthfully, in much of our lived experience, we don’t fully know what things mean. As much as we know, or think we know, there is always much more beyond our knowing. There is always more going on than meets the eye. What we can know for certain is that God is always at work.

Few of us will find a baby on our door step or a winning lottery ticket lying in the parking lot. Most of the events we live through from day to day are events we’ve lived through before. Mundane and redundant, our lives sometimes take on a dull coat of ordinariness. But in those places where we are least likely to look, in moments when we aren’t paying close attention, meaning is present. God is working. Unseen purposes are unfolding; a divine design is taking shape.

Prayer:
Gracious God, we thank you that none of our days are void of meaning. Remind us today that you are at work in ways that we cannot see, doing things beyond our awareness. Keep us alert, looking for signs of your presence in the most ordinary parts of this day. Amen.