A friend mentioned that he had been listening to the Bible on audio books.

 

"The book of Deuteronomy talks about when the children of Israel were released from slavery in Egypt. Yet even when they were free, they were still lost in the wilderness. For a long time."

 

The image of a band of Hebrews escaping the whips of harsh task masters, only to traipse through the desert suddenly jettisoned from the Holy Land and into my lap. It was while they were there that Moses climbed Mount Sinai to receive the Ten Commandments.

 

There have been habits that I have with great effort extracted myself from, only to wander around like a misguided hiker. Just because I had broken the grip that a nasty habit had over me, it did not render me immediately in the land of Kindness. Yes I could hold my tongue about the faux pas my kids or husband incurred, barely, but it would be awhile before I replaced those comments with altruism.

 

It was forty years from when the Israelites left Egypt to when they reached the land flowing with milk and honey. That is not what you could call instant gratification. There are qualities I have been pursuing in my meandering way for an equally protracted amount of time. Compassion has shown up on my to do list since the seventies.

 

Yet it does not seem like an unreasonable price for an attribute that I hope will endure for ten thousand years.