“This is how you shall eat it:  your loins girded, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand; and you shall eat it hurriedly.”  (Exodus 11:11)

Each year as we remember the Passover, we are reminded that this meal was, from its very inception, a symbolic meal.  Don’t boil the meat; roast it only (cook it fast – they didn’t have microwaves).  No left-overs; whatever isn’t consumed by morning is to be burnt up; invite neighbors over to minimize waste.  Eat bitter herbs to remember the bitterness of your bondage in Egypt.  This is a “to-go” meal.  It is the last supper that Israel is going to have in Egypt.  Come the next morning, they will be on their way.

Thinking of eating with “staff in your hand,” I am reminded that while they were preparing their last meal in Egypt they also had to pack.  As I write this, I am in the throes of moving.  We (mostly Sandy, to be honest) have been planning and preparing and working on this move for weeks.  We’ve had the moving date on our calendar for two months.  And yet, we are still frantically rallying to make the finish line.  We aren’t unusual.  Moving is one of those things that stress a lot of people out. 

One of the reasons that moving is so difficult is that we have so much stuff.  The Israelites had no option of calling movers or even renting a truck.  They were going to carry out their possessions.  They may have had little but you can be sure even some of the little they had was left behind as they fled Egypt.

I think it has ever been thus.  When God calls us to move on to a different place we have to leave some things behind: fears and doubts, outmoded ways of thinking, self-perceptions distorted by sin and feelings of inadequacy.  We have to leave behind our complacency and our investment in the way things are, our anxious attachment to the illusion of a predictable future.  We can’t carry too much baggage or we will get stuck, left behind, trapped in the very bondage we seek to escape.

Ask yourself what you might need to leave behind as you make your pilgrimage.

Prayer:  Beckoning God, we know that heeding your call is more valuable than any attachment.  We know this, and yet we have a hard time letting go.  Grant us courage and trust to abandon our attachments as we journey with you.  Amen.