Murmuring In My Tent

If my plan had worked out as I had so carefully planned it, I’d be on the road this morning arriving in Amarillo, Texas, tonight.  My plan didn’t work out and for the last few days I’ve been murmuring like the Hebrew people of old murmured in their tents (Psalm 106:25; Deuteronomy 1:27).  To murmur is to grumble, complain, mutter, and moan.  This malady is common to us all and I seem to be extremely prone to it.

The Hebrew people in the wilderness murmured in their tents (in their inner being) about their situation.  They muttered: “It was because the Lord hated us that he brought us out of Egypt to hand us over to the Amorites to be wiped out.”  That’s strong language, but isn’t that what we murmur in our heads when disappointments come.  We don’t shout it out, we just murmur it in our tents.  God must be against us to have brought us to this place or this situation.  We just have to blame someone or something else for our predicament—and God seems often to be our primary target of blame.

William Penn visits with me this morning as I murmur.  “For disappointments that come not by our own folly, they are the trials or corrections of heaven: and it is our own fault if they prove not to our advantage.  To repine at them does not mend the matter: it is only to grumble at our Creator.”

Our road trip was canceled, not because of our own folly, but because our Odysseus (mini-motorhome) wasn’t up to it.  That’s the fact of the matter.  All our disappointment, complaining, grumbling, muttering, and moaning “does not mend the matter” and never will. Rather than murmur, Penn says, we ought to seek “the way to turn our water into wine.”  As E. Herman puts it:  “No wayfarer can murmur habitually and keep his soul alive.”

If I were on the road to Amarillo today, I would have missed seeing the first iris bloom of the season, the azaleas in all their grandeur, the peony buds swelling, and the sight of the rhododendron right here in my own back yard.  I would have missed seeing the bluejay frolicking in the birdbath and the squirrels dancing on the top of the fence.  In every disappointment there is a way “to turn our water into wine.”  “It is,” as Penn says, “our own fault if they (our disappointments and mishaps) prove not to our advantage.”