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Any group of people who are statistically successful would automatically qualify as the world's role models. Logically, it should have been the believers in Christ. It would have been easier to convert, convince and communicate the love of God to the masses, for whom the daily chores of life throttle the desire of living eternally.

However it is never so; believers seem to attract sufferings. Our Lord said, in this world you will have trials. It is in the definitive, though the spell checker on my computer would like to lessen the intensity by auto suggesting 'would' for 'will'. I had never previously understood why God's children had to go through unbelievable and seemingly purposeless sufferings.

I was meditating about the people of Israel under bondage in Egypt. Israel reeling under the terror of the Pharaoh, prompted Moses to independently believe that he was the best redeemer, circumstance and opportunity could provide. Having pre-empted God's way and timing, God puts him through the 'Sinai Institute of Learning and Development' to empty him of the Egyptian Arrogance. There he learns patience and meekness, in tending a self-willed and 'easily-will-go-astray' flock of sheep, much as the people of Israel years later.

During those forty years, back in Egypt the people of Israel would continue to plead and cry, under the relentless torture in Egypt. A generation goes by, before Moses has a makeover and is ready to God's perfection as the 'Redeemer of His People'. God's time moves, it seems, too slowly for man's convenience. During those grooming years, Israel would have discussed endlessly the aborted redemption, as they tossed in their beds trying to catch a few winks before the dawn awakens to another round of abuse. How damaging it would have been for their feeble untested faith, as they lived clutching to the stories passed on from generations of the wonder working God of their fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

When Moses finally reappears on the scene, it is not before the furnace is heated seven times as it were, before Israel is born as a free nation. One of the most amazing verses in Exodus is found in chapter 12 and verse 41, ". even the self same day it came to pass, that all the hosts of the LORD went out from the land of Egypt." God doesn't miss His time-table by a milli-second. Luke 22:14 says, And when the hour was come he sat down, ." The song that we sing so often, "In His time, He makes all things beautiful, in His time," takes on a new meaning when we realize that God's pudding requires that exact amount of heat and time to bake to perfection. During those four hundred and thirty years, though the counselors of Pharaoh never realized, God was molding, in a protected environment, a divided family into a nation.

God who has promised to deliver His people, and can do so in the twinkling of an eye [1 Cor 15:52], allows the trials to mould and perfect us as part of His goal and plan. It is perfection that takes time.