The whole Israelite community set out from Elim and came to the Desert, which is between Elim and Sinai, on the fifteenth day of the second month after they had come out of Egypt. In the desert the whole community grumbled against Moses and Aaron. The Israelites said to them, "If only we had died by the Lord's hand in Egypt! There we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted, but you have brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death."
(Exodus 16:1-3)

Grumbling. If we had only died in Egypt where we had everything we had ever wanted, but you, Moses, brought us out into this desert to starve us to death.

The Apostle says, "Do not grumble." What is so wrong with grumbling? Sometimes I think it is one of my favorite activities. In some churches that I have been a part of, I think it is what we most loved to do on our breaks between services. In our culture, to grumble or complain or to criticize sometimes seems an act that is valued and seems very minimally dangerous to us.

But there are problems with grumbling. First, we need to define it. To grumble is not to acknowledge difficulty or pain or suffering. That is real and part of the human experience. But grumbling is to have an habitual mind-set that assumes the absolute worst, that when something happens, the mind immediately goes to the negative consequences and focuses on the expected negative outcome.

Grumbling does several things. Grumbling catches us up in a mood, in a spirit, in an attitude which tends to cause us to focus on unbelief instead of on belief, to see what is negative instead of seeing the possibilities for good that exist in the present.

Two of my favorite characters in literature are, one, Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh—Eeyore with his "O, Bother!" and his sense that no matter what happened, that whatever he wanted to happen would go wrong and he could count on it. So Eeyore lives his life with his head down and his tail bedraggled because that is what he expects out of life.

And then, C. S. Lewis has a wonderful character, the Marshwiggle. In his story called The Silver Chair, the Marshwiggle sets out with the two children on a great adventure to rescue the lost prince, an adventure of faith. But the Marshwiggle says, "We can count on it. We will get lost. We will start to attack each other. We will probably end up killing each other. There is no way we can succeed in this venture anyway."

The habit of grumbling is one that can infect the soul. It falsifies the past. When you look at what Israel did when she grumbled, when Israel was in slavery, in bondage, under oppression, she falsified the past by saying, There in Egypt, we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted." But it wasn't true.

Sometimes we are tempted to live in the past and think that those good old days were better than anything that is going on now or anything that might come in the future. Grumbling falsifies the past. Grumbling also teaches us to distrust God. It is a denial that God is good and that God means good for us, that even in difficult and hard circumstances, the loving God is compassionately reaching out that we might know that we are loved, redeemed, called out of bondage into freedom. Grumbling denies the goodness of God.

In one of Israel's times of grumbling she says, "We must choose ourselves new leaders and go back to Egypt." She would rather be in familiar bondage, with leaders she has chosen that will take her backwards, than depend on the leaders God has given. Grumbling sometimes leads us to scapegoating, to blaming, to looking for someone on whom we can vent our distrust and our uncertainty.

God never rejects the cry of the needy. God hears and cares, listens and loves and works in history and in our lives, so that we might have purpose and meaning and joy in the journey. But grumbling cheats us out of that.

There is another alternative—to move from grumbling to gratitude. It is woven throughout the New Testament. The instruction as simple as the one that says, "Do not grumble" is the instruction that says, "And be thankful. Give thanks."

In Hebrews we are told, "We have a kingdom that cannot be shaken. Let us give thanks to God who is the one worthy of worship, who is making meaning in our lives, who is our companion along the way in the journey."

And so we can turn from grumbling to gratitude. What does gratitude do? Gratitude teaches us to acknowledge the authority, the goodness and the love of God. Gratitude expresses the hope we have for the future that we draw from God's faithfulness in the past, and in the present as the companion alongside of us. Gratitude remembers rightly. It doesn't falsify or romanticize the past. It remembers rightly the mighty acts of God working in salvation through Jesus Christ to bring us into the fullness of life, forgiveness of sins, a life of encouragement and hope and joy.

Thankfulness expresses our faith and, at the same time, it nourishes our faith so that it grows. We are told about Abraham, the great father of the people of God. Abraham grew strong in his faith as he gave thanks to God. The very act of thanksgiving can deepen and strengthen and encourage and lift us, as well as the others around us, who are affected by our grumbling or our gratitude.

This summer I had the amazing, wonderful privilege of visiting several places in Asia where the church had been under persecution. One of those was in Nepal. Nepal is the world's only official Hindu kingdom. In Nepal from the very beginning until very recent times, it has been illegal to profess Christian faith or to encourage anyone else to profess Christian faith. The church had been forced underground and many of the leaders in the church had been imprisoned, had been tortured, had experienced suffering.

I had the privilege of going to teach the Bible to the United Mission of Nepal, thirty-eight Christian agencies from all over the world working together to help the people of Nepal who are among the poorest in the world. And what I discovered was that two and a half years ago or so, when there was a change in the government, for the first time the Christians were allowed to come above ground. We found that there were between 50,000 and 100,000 Christians in that kingdom high in the Himalayas.

One of the characteristics of those Christians is that they are people of gratitude. As you listen to them share their faith, you will hear them speak of the mercy of God, the faithfulness of God, the dependability of God. They have set their hope on God and that has brought them through decades of persecution, centuries of exclusion, into a new place of joy and hope.

On that same trip, I went from Nepal into China, into a closed province that still today is not open to outsiders unless you have the invitation of the government officials to allow you to come in. I was in a town called Hefei, an industrialized town with a million or more people. On Sunday morning I said to the party officials who were my hosts that, as a Christian, it was my habit to go to church on Sunday mornings, that I drew strength from the encouragement of worshipping with other Christians. They said, "All right. We'll make arrangements so that you can go to church."

I went to the church which had been closed for decades and I saw the pastor who had been arrested, tortured, imprisoned, and sent into exile for long years away from his people. When I saw him—in a church that had been built to hold about 400 people in which there were over 1,200 people crammed into every corner and nook, people with their legs stacked on top of each other because they were so eager to come to church and rejoice in the gospel—he radiated a kind of love and joy.

When he was asked questions about the hard times and the suffering and the torture, he said with the utmost simplicity, "Yes, it was difficult, but I was never alone and I discovered God with me every minute of the way through the journey. I thank God for what He did in my life and what He is doing in the lives of the people of China."

Now, in that great country, the estimates are that there are perhaps as many as 100 million Christians—Christians who have seen the worst; Christians who have discovered the love and faithfulness of God no matter what the circumstances; Christians who have learned what it is to move from grumbling as the basic attitude of life to one of thankfulness and gratitude to God.

Hear the word of the scriptures as we find it in Hebrews 12:28. "Since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us give thanks by which we offer to God an acceptable worship with reverence and awe."

May we worship God with hearts full of gratitude and thankfulness, as we discover day by day His faithfulness and goodness to us. Amen.

David Hardin: Six years ago you took on the Presidency of a wonderful school near Philadelphia. There aren't very many women presidents of colleges. Why not? What's going on?

Roberta Hestenes: That is an interesting question as to why not. I think the patterns and habits and ways of traditional thinking have probably governed this. It is changing. There are more women college presidents and university presidents than there were, but I still am the only woman President in the Christian College Coalition.

I think some of it has to do with certain biblical understandings which perhaps are more traditional, that do not appreciate women.

Hardin: Yet, Paul appointed women ministers for his churches.

Hestenes: When you look at the New Testament, it is astonishing to see the number of women who were in various kinds of leadership roles in the New Testament Church.

Hardin: I remember hearing a lecture somewhere that said that Miriam was as important as Moses in the exodus.

In any event, you mentioned something that you are doing about creating a little more of a leadership style for women. Do you want to tell us about that?

Hestenes: At Eastern College we are beginning a center for Christian women in leadership. We believe that there is a need for a place to equip Christian women, to encourage them and to empower them in their various leadership roles, whether those are roles as volunteers, in the church, in the marketplace, but in a way that takes seriously the gifts that God has given them. We have been talking to women and men all over the country. We are quite excited about the possibilities of this new center.

Hardin: I think it is a marvelous idea because it has been my observation, and I think there is some truth to it, that women often do not know their own power. They are afraid to take leadership.

I have been in so many meetings where people stand up and introduce themselves, and a man stands up and says, "I am Joe Jensen and I am pastor of a UCC Church in Oak Park." Then a woman stands up and says, "I'm Joe's wife." I sense we are getting past that a little bit.

Hestenes: Well, it's all right to be Joe's wife but she is a person herself, as well.

Hardin: Maybe there is more to her than that.

Hestenes: He didn't identify himself as only her husband, that's true.

Hardin: Is this going to be a curriculum or just a place where they can come for seminars?

Hestenes: There will be several things. There will be a program on spiritual direction for the growth of spirituality. We will do seminars and workshops across the country. We will provide resources. We hope to have a retreat center. We will have a number of different kinds of things.

Hardin: It strikes me that one of the things that the feminine brings to leadership is a little more of a negotiating stance, a little less of an adversarial stance, a little less, "We have got to win it." My observation is that sometimes women are a little more in the "win, win" context. We need that balance.

Hestenes: I think in our culture we women have been encouraged to be relational, to care about the interpersonal. I think our experiences with our children teach us some of these things and I think that women have a lot to bring in the full diversity of gifts and roles that need to be exercised.

Hardin: Some of the women I know feel that the violence in the world is really a function of a kind of unbalanced patriarchal approach and not enough of the feminine. Maybe that is true.

Hestenes: I don't tend to agree. I have seen women who can be quite violent. I don't think women are superior to men. I think we need both.

Hardin: Maybe we're talking about the masculine and the feminine more than about men and women.

When you were chairman of World Vision, a major world relief organization and maybe the biggest volunteer organization of all, they used to feed people and run refugee camps. I know that the feeding of people is not much of a solution. I believe they were among the leaders in going into the idea of development rather than feeding.

Hestenes: World Vision does both. It does do relief in desperate situations like Somalia, Mozambique, Sudan, other places where there is a need for relief. But, the long-term answer to poverty is community development where you empower people so that they, with dignity and their own values and culture, can create jobs, can provide for their families, can break their way out of poverty.

Hardin: One of the things I have learned about development in some of my travels for Opportunity International, which involved a fair amount of energy, is that ultimately something has to happen. If you feed people, you don't do them any good in the long run.

Hestenes: If you only feed them.

Hardin: Somehow you have got to get them back to some kind of an active life.

Hestenes: That's right. One of the biggest tasks in Somalia will be the rebuilding of that society and the creation of jobs and structures that support the people. You can't have permanent dependency. It is degrading to people; it does not help them. You have to move into development as the lasting solution.

Hardin: The other just doesn't work. It has been great having you with us and I hope we do it again soon.