Clare

I wrote this letter to be read out at the dedication of our daughter Ffion.

As I prepared for the dedication I remembered baby Moses' story, and found myself reading it in a whole new way. I would love to have interviewed Moses' mother's for this site. What a great example of God answering a woman's prayer! This letter will have to do instead, and the real thing is at the beginning of Exodus in the Bible.

Dear Moses’ Mum

You don’t know me, but I’ve heard of you. I hope you don’t mind me writing to you like this. It’s just that I can’t get your story out of my head at the moment.

I heard that you had a baby boy, three months old, and you were keeping him hidden. The army was ethnically cleansing your neighbourhood, and you had friends and family whose male babies had been taken from their mothers, and killed. You knew that, sooner or later, your child would be discovered too.

I can’t imagine what you’d been through, hiding your pregnancy, the birth, and a newborn baby. I can’t imagine your feelings in the first few weeks as you held him and fed him and wondered how long you could keep him alive. I can’t imagine… but I’m sure that you cried a lot and I’m even more sure that you prayed.

It’s what you did next that completely stuns me. You made a basket, waterproofed it, and with the help of your daughter you smuggled the baby to a nearby riverbank. Then you left him, in the basket, floating among the reeds.

I’m sorry, but I have really struggled with this part of your story. You left your three-month old baby in a river. You left your daughter to watch from a distance, but you walked away. He was completely at the mercy of the water, the current, the insects, the weather, and even the crocodiles that live in your part of the world. When I picture the scene, I basically see a tiny baby being abandoned. How could you?

But I’ve meditated and prayed over what you did, and now I think I see something more. Yes, in a sense you did abandon your baby, but you abandoned him to God. I think that, in your fear on the one hand and your trust in a loving God on the other, you had done the only thing possible – you decided in your heart to completely place him into God’s hands. Men were trying to kill him, you reasoned, but God would have mercy.

I bet you prayed a thousand times, ‘Lord, you gave him to me, and I give him back to you. Your will be done. Only please let him live. Even if I never get to see him again, Lord, please let him live.’ Then you put him in the river.

Perhaps to put him in the river was to give him to the God who had saved Noah through the flood – I don’t know. But I really believe that you did put him into God’s hands, and God responded, because of what happened next. It turned out that your baby was really in the safest possible place, despite the crocodiles. He was found by the Princess, the daughter of the man who was ordering the babies’ slaughter. Your baby was crying, and she rescued him. She sent your daughter off to find a woman who could nurse him. The daughter brought you. You were then paid, by the same palace who had tried to kill him, to breastfeed your own son. That sounds like God to me.

After that, your son was adopted by the princess, and he grew up in the palace. But I imagine that, although you adored him, you had dedicated him so completely to God that you didn’t think of him as yours anyway. Maybe that’s why God was able to take hold of him so completely and to change many destinies through Moses, the baby you gave to God.

I pray that God would give us faith like yours today, to completely dedicate and even abandon our daughter to him. Like you, we want to pray:

‘Lord – you made her and she came from you. We give her back to you today, and we place her in the river of your will for her life, knowing it’s the safest place she can be. She is yours. Let your will be done, and thank you that nobody can take her out of your hands. Amen.’