What’s In Your Basket?

Jochebed placing Moses in the Nile

A well-known credit card company advertises its product with the tag-line “What’s in your wallet?”

Today I’m asking, “What’s in your basket?”

The banks of the Nile used to be lined with reeds, and papyrus marshes occupied large areas of the Delta in the north. The ancient Egyptians used these reeds to make paper, baskets, sandals, mats, rope, blankets, tables, chairs, mattresses, medicine, perfume, food, clothes, and even boats! Remains of baskets have been found dating to 5000 BC.

The most common use for baskets, however, was for household storage. They could be made rigid and lined with mud, or they could be made of fine grasses to be quite flexible. Some had lids or handles, and some were woven with elaborate patterns of different colored reeds or leaves.

In ancient Egypt, baskets were made in a wide variety of shapes and sizes, and different shapes even had specific names.

Baskets were usually made in one of two ways: weaving flexible reeds in and out between sturdier reeds that formed the ‘ribs’ of the structure, or coiling a long, thin bundle of grasses or reeds that are then secured by stitching the coils together.

Basket, Egypt, Middle Kingdom, c. 1900 BC

Creating a basket can take days, as well as enormous concentration, but as with most things, practice makes the task easier.

It is into one of these lovingly made baskets that Jochebed placed the three-month-old Moses. Like her other children and her husband, this baby was her most precious possession, more precious than even her own life. She trusted him to El Shaddai—God Almighty. I doubt she expected the princess to find him but instead hoped a loving Egyptian mother would rescue him from the Nile and raise him as her own. Either way, from this point on, she had no control. Still, she let go.

So what’s in your basket? Is there something in your life you need to surrender to God, to allow him to take complete control over?