There is but a single story in the Bible that mentions frogs. It so happened that on an ordinary morning twenty years ago I was teaching that particular one in Sunday School. I had my arsenal of puppets, and art supplies ready. Then a little boy who occasionally came asked if he could show me his pet. Only marginally grasping his question I said yes. He opened a bucket, and out jumped thirty tiny frogs.
Pandemonium broke loose, as the kids scurried after them, jumping across the floor. It was magical.
This week the church service was about those amphibians. They and the other miracles that hounded the Egyptians when Moses demanded that Pharoah let his people go. But instead of referring to them as plagues, the minister held them to be "signs and wonders". Those words hold an entirely different connotation, and they caught my fancy.
Pharoah considered these actions, which included the death of all cattle, and clouds of lice, and a torrent of locusts, to be punishment. But calling them signs and wonders suggests something else.
God was offering tangible evidence of what happens when we enslave one another. Not with chains necessarily, but with our contempt. Pharoah was given a string of chances to heed the warnings, and choose differently. In a few instances, he started to relent. But then once the annoyance abated, he changed his mind. It wasn't until the death of his oldest son that he released the Israelite nation.
With my first batch of children I yelled. There were niggling indications that it was a bad idea, like how they cried, and the way I felt while doing it. But things had to get worse before they got better. I am grateful for those signs, and the wonder they kindled in me. Even though they were messy, like a landscape of ruined crops, it helped me understand the damage I was doing to people I love.
One of the comments after church described that condition in which people are born without the ability to feel pain. It turns out that many of them die, since they are unable to respond to hurtful situations. Pain is one of the ways God speaks to us. Which causes me to wonder.
