It isn’t that they didn’t have GPS back in those days (which is where the recalculating joke comes from if you haven’t used one). Nor is it that difficult to get from point A to point B navigating by sun and stars, even with a million people.

It wasn’t a geographical challenge that kept the people of Israel in the desert for that forty-year journey between Egypt and the Promised Land. In theory you can walk it in six days.

Well, with the elderly, children and all the luggage it might take longer. But certainly no more than three months – it is only about 800 kilometres. The road may have been a little less smooth back then than it is today, but it wasn’t impassable.

The problem wasn’t the distance. The issue was attitude.

Have we changed all that much in the past 3,000 years? Or do we still have attitude problems, a separation from God, that makes what should be a short trip a massive undertaking? There’s always someone in the back seat asking “are we there yet?” when it is obvious we aren’t.

Those are my random thoughts on this Sunday. You can read the story of those desert wanderings in The Bible. You can pick up the story in Exodus 13.