“When she could hide him [Moses] no longer she took for him a basket made of bulrushes and daubed it with bitumen and pitch. She put the child in it and placed it among the reeds by the river bank.” Exodus 2:3
A mother’s love for her child is an amazing thing. We will defend our children at any cost. But sometimes the best way to protect them is to let them go.
Moses had grown too large to stay hidden any more. The officials were bound to find him sooner or later. Now we have no way of knowing what his mother was thinking. Was she hoping that he would float to a safe distant city down the river where a kindly farmer would find him? Did she actually have the princess in mind when she put him in the reeds? We have no way of knowing what her ultimate hope was for her precious son. But we do know this; in order to keep him alive, she had to let him go. And we can only imagine the pain that must have caused her. Yet she still had hope. Hope in her God that He would protect this son that was so obviously special. He had survived those three months without being discovered and immediately killed that was no small feat. God had managed to keep him alive this long, perhaps He would continue to bless little Moses and keep him alive long enough to find a new family to care for him.
I doubt that she could have imagined what came next. The audacity of hoping that not only by letting him go, he would end up coming back to her and she would get PAID to do the very thing she wanted to do in the first place. Mother her child. But beyond that, to then be able to watch him grow and flourish while living in the palace as the Pharoah’s grandson! He was right under the nose that had been trying to kill him in the first place.
We all have things in our lives that are REALLY hard to give up. Things that mean the whole world to us. Things that are so much a part of ourselves that it hurts when we let them go, Moses was her child, he was her flesh and blood. He was a part of her heart living outside her body. But in order to see him even have a chance at life, she had to let him go. And I believe that she clung to that audacious hope that somehow he would survive and she would get to see him again before she died. But even if she didn’t, she would know in her heart that she did everything she could to help him survive.
Tamar Knochel 