Exodus 13:21 “By day the LORD went ahead of them in a pillar of cloud to guide them on their way and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light, so that they could travel by day or night.”
Self-sufficiency and the Christian faith do not run parallel tracks. A.J. Swoboda writes in The Dusty Ones, “Needs ground us in God because needs ground us in dependency.” He says God created us with needs to be touched, loved, spoken to and fed as a way of drawing us to him. Without those needs we might think of God as irrelevant. We need God. We need each other. Sometimes it takes a crisis—maybe even a pandemic—to reveal how insufficient we really are.
When Israel exited Egypt, they knew the Promised Land was their destination, but had no idea how to get there. Have you ever had a dream or a goal with no plan to achieve it? That was the nation of Israel. God, however, provided them with their own GPS. During the day, he led them by a pillar of cloud, and by night with a pillar of fire. They needed to know which way to go. But even more, they needed to learn how to depend on God.
The stay-at-home order during COVID-19 has certainly revealed our need in the church. How do we continue to meet the spiritual needs of the people? Do we gather? What precautions should we take? We don’t know what to do, but our eyes are on you (2 Chron. 20:12). The structure we typically depended on is no longer an option. Like Israel, we need to “follow the cloud.”
In our small part of the Body of Christ, we’ve found relying on God for direction to be invigorating. He moved us to drive-in services on Sunday mornings. And through them, ways to support local businesses and ministry to the homeless. We were needier than we knew. But our need, as Swoboda notes, has drawn us to greater dependency and intimacy with the Lord.
My husband has all the data from his computer stored in the internet cloud. He’s dependent on accessing that information when he needs it. But this season is teaching him, and all of us, there’s a far more consequential cloud to be depending on.
So are you “following the cloud” to access your information?