A Single Parent’s Plague of Locusts and Other Irritations
Melissa connected with me on a Wednesday evening at a prayer time in our church. This was one of those God-ordained situations. Because of another responsibility, I usually didn’t attend the mid-week prayer time, but this particular Wednesday I was there when Melissa decided to visit. Something was said about single parents, and after the meeting she approached me.
Melissa was a single mom with two daughters. She had just gotten out of jail. She had found Jesus there—yes, this actually happens, and when it does, Satan doesn’t like it. Like in the Old Testament story about Moses trying to convince Pharaoh to let the Lord’s people go, Melissa had been plagued with many irritations. But in Melissa’s situation, it was Satan causing the irritations. He just couldn’t let Melissa go and live her life for the Lord.
When she got out of jail, she only had a few days to find a job, get a car, and secure a place to live, or she would lose custody of her two precious daughters. When I met her, she was working, had found a car, and was living with her daughters in a single rented room in a lady’s home in our area.
I invited Melissa and her girls to join our single parents’ monthly dinner the next week. When she walked into the restaurant, I could tell something was wrong. The lady who was renting her a room had just been killed in a car wreck that morning, and the woman’s thirty-year-old son was living there and had brought in a lot of alcohol and was having a party that night. Melissa knew that if alcohol or any drugs were in the house when the state authorities came, she would lose custody of her kids.
The former foster mother of her daughters invited her to come and live in her home, so that problem was solved pretty quickly. But then her car went out. The church had a connection with one of the garages in our area, and we were able to convince the mechanic to give her a break on fixing her car. Meanwhile, her oldest daughter had problems in school and was diagnosed with ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) and had to be put on medication.
Melissa was trying so hard to survive, but things just kept knocking her down. She struggled with knowing how to parent her daughters. Most of us parent the way we were parented, and Melissa had not had good parenting models.
Melissa is the desperate single mom from chapter 1 who had all of her things stolen from the storage unit. Right after our church was able to help her fill the storage unit back up, her car broke down again. We took up a collection and were able to help her get the car fixed again.
Satan just kept beating on her door. Melissa had been in foster care when she was young, and her parents eventually lost custody of her. She had been adopted when she was fourteen but always competed for her adoptive mom’s attention with the mom’s birth daughter. Her entire life had been filled with irritations, crises, and traumas. Now she was trying so hard to live a faith-filled life for the first time, and she didn’t want her daughters to go through what she had.
Everyone experiences hardships and devastating situations, even though it might not seem that way. Sometimes we feel like we are the only ones. Or as single parents, we may know others are as stressed as we are, but we get so bogged down with our own problems that we have trouble caring.
Often this is because of all the locusts swarming around us—you know, the little things that become huge and overwhelming and devastating. Let’s look in the book of Exodus and read about how God used Moses to bring devastation to Pharaoh.
The Israelites Were in Bondage—and Sometimes We Are Too
As single parents, we have to consider how we handle irritations. Do we let them harden us? Do we let them harden our children? What is God trying to teach us as He allows such irritations in our lives? Or how will He be glorified through them?
The people of Israel were in bondage to Pharaoh, the Egyptian king. (For a deeper understanding, read chapters 7–10 of Exodus.) God sent Moses to deliver His people. As we read the biblical text for this chapter, know that God had already brought a lot of disaster to the Egyptians, and Pharaoh had made concessions and promises, but each time Moses asked God to remove the plague, the Egyptian king went back on his word.
“Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘Go to Pharaoh, for I have hardened his heart and the hearts of his officials so that I may perform these miraculous signs of mine among them that you may tell your children and grandchildren how I dealt harshly with the Egyptians and how I performed my signs among them, and that you may know that I am the Lord’” (Exodus 10:1–2).
God told Moses what he must do, “Go to Pharaoh,” and He also told Moses that He had hardened Pharaoh’s heart. Why would God harden Pharaoh’s heart when He was planning to deliver His people?
Our last chapter addressed how we sometimes go through an experience not for ourselves but for someone else. Depending on how you handle a situation, your story may very well be told to your grandchildren and their children. That’s a sobering thought!
There have been a few times in my single-parent journey that I didn’t handle something very well, and now as adults my kids love telling those stories to my grandchildren.
Through Moses, God had already done several things to convince Pharaoh to let the people go. If you look back to Exodus chapters 7 through 10, you can see some of the ways God used Moses to convince Pharaoh to release the people of Israel—frogs, gnats, flies, hail, and the death of livestock.
But after all these plagues, God still hardened Pharaoh’s heart. So Moses told Pharaoh that God would send locusts to his country and they would devour every tree the hail hadn’t killed.
If you refuse to let them go, I will bring locusts into your country tomorrow. They will cover the face of the ground so that it cannot be seen. They will devour what little you have left after the hail, including every tree that is growing in your fields. They will fill your houses and those of all your officials and all the Egyptians—something neither your fathers nor your forefathers have ever seen from the day they settled in this land till now.
Exodus 10:4–6
At first, the locusts probably didn’t seem all that bad. The Egyptians had experienced gnats, flies, frogs, hail, etc. How much worse could locusts be?
So Moses stretched out his staff over Egypt, and the Lord made an east wind blow across the land all that day and all that night. By morning the wind had brought the locusts; they invaded all Egypt and settled down in every area of the country in great numbers. Never before had there been such a plague of locusts, nor will there ever be again. They covered all the ground until it was black. They devoured all that was left after the hail—everything growing in the fields and the fruit on the trees. Nothing green remained on tree or plant in all the land of Egypt.
Exodus 10:13–15
One can only imagine what that experience must have been like. All Pharaoh had to do was tell Moses to take the Lord’s people and go, so Pharaoh called Moses and told him he had sinned against Moses’ God. He asked Moses to forgive him and to pray to his God to take the deadly plague away and then Pharaoh would let the people go. Of course, we know that God again hardens Pharaoh’s heart. God wasn’t quite through with Pharaoh yet.
One of the “plagues” that affected me was dirty dishes piled up in the sink and on the counter. I’m not sure why this bothered me so much, but it did. My son was pretty good about keeping the dishes cleared when it was his week, but my daughter couldn’t seem to care less when it was her week. It wasn’t an earth-shattering thing, of course, and I was pretty good at holding my tongue.
I was great at not doing them myself until it came to the weekend when the kids would visit their dad. When I would get up on Saturday morning, I couldn’t bear to look at the dishes, so I would end up doing them myself.
At that time, both my kids had jobs to bring in extra income. My daughter worked, kept her grades decent, marched in the band, and stayed active in the church youth group. She had a lot on her plate. But so did I.
This small irritation could have become a huge thing if I had let it. I could have nagged her. I could have punished her. I could have made her brother do the dishes. None of these were viable solutions.
If I had nagged her, it could have driven a wedge between us. If I had punished her, it could have backfired and created a hostile teen. If I had taken that chore away and given it to her brother, it wouldn’t have been fair to him, and she would no longer have been contributing to our family.
I sought the advice of a very wise youth counselor. He gave me some options that would allow her to retain her dignity and me to retain her respect for me as her mother. I prayed about the things he said and decided what I thought would be best.
I had a meeting with my daughter at a time when neither of us was rushed or tired and explained in a calm voice how upsetting it was to me to have to see dirty dishes all weekend. She said she really was trying, but she had so much homework every night. She intended to do the dishes but then she’d get sidetracked and put them off until the next night, and then before she knew it, Friday was here. She said she would try to do them on Fridays, but a lot of times her dad would come to get them and get upset if he had to wait. She promised to try harder.
I told her that I understood her dilemma, but still dirty dishes were a problem and often there were no clean dishes for me to eat out of all weekend. Then I told her, “I really do understand, so here’s the deal. If you leave dirty dishes in the sink and go to your dad’s for the weekend, then I will take your lunch money for the next week and use it to eat out all weekend. I will not do the dishes. And it will not be your brother’s week to do dishes until you have cleaned up the kitchen. Is there any part of this you don’t understand?” Always make sure your teen understands what has been said.
I’m sure you can figure out that the next time she went to her dad’s I got to eat out all weekend. That was the only weekend I got to eat out. She didn’t like having to make her lunch all the next week because she didn’t have any lunch money. My daughter’s heart wasn’t hardened like Pharaoh’s, but it could have been if I hadn’t handled the situation with calmness, praying through it and thinking about how to handle it.
Your Personal Irritation
Take a few minutes to think about your personal irritations. (Record them in the “Going Deeper” section.) Perhaps your irritations have nothing to do with your children. One could be excessive traffic, which makes you overwrought, anxious, or angry by the time you get home. Some irritations are out of your control, but as an adult you are still responsible for how you respond.
When things are out of your control, it is important to seek the Lord. Ask for Him to guide you. Ask Him to show you how to respond. Throughout the entire story of the exodus of the Israelites, Moses always sought the Lord, knowing the power didn’t come from him but from God. Don’t you imagine there were times Moses wanted to throw his hands up and quit? Moses couldn’t quit, and you can’t either. You are the parent, and God has given your children to you. Your power must come from Him.
Pharaoh quickly summoned Moses and Aaron and said, “I have sinned against the Lord your God and against you. Now forgive my sin once more and pray to the Lord your God to take this deadly plague away from me.”
Moses then left Pharaoh and prayed to the Lord. And the Lord changed the wind to a very strong west wind, which caught up the locusts and carried them into the Red Sea. Not a locust was left anywhere in Egypt.
Exodus 10:16–19
The west wind blowing the locusts away is an example of how even the “forces of nature are compelled to obey His sovereign will.”1 God is all-powerful and all-knowing.
In some situations, you might seek wise counsel, such as that of a pastor, youth minister, or youth counselor. Even with this counsel, it is up to you to think about, pray about, and evaluate what is best in your individual situation.
No matter what the irritation, God can be in control if you let Him. God can also get the glory. It may not seem like it at first, but hopefully someday you will see how God can be glorified in all things.
We will tell the next generation the praiseworthy deeds of the Lord, his power, and the wonders he has done. He decreed statutes for Jacob and established the law in Israel, which he commanded our ancestors to teach their children, so the next generation would know them, even the children yet to be born, and they in turn would tell their children. Then they would put their trust in God and would not forget his deeds but would keep his commands.
Psalm 78:4–7 NIV
I’m sure Melissa’s two daughters will tell their children about the hard time their mom had and about how each of them found the Lord Jesus Christ as their Savior through those trials. Melissa eventually met a wonderful single dad in our church, and they are now married, and he is helping her raise her children. God is blessing her immensely. She is getting help understanding her past. She is journaling and coming to understand how things in her childhood have affected her own parenting abilities.
In jail Melissa had no hope until she met Jesus Christ, but through Christ there is hope. Melissa didn’t give up. With all the irritations, she probably wanted to give up, but she knew she had a responsibility to her daughters and to the heavenly Father who brought her out of the murky waters of her childhood.
GOING DEEPER