Recording the Israelites journey.
On my first day as a cub reporter on a daily newspaper, my editor gave me the city council agenda and told me to make it into a news story. It was short and simple, nothing special, but it showed my editors I could cobble together sentences and follow AP Style. It was, needless to say, but I’m going to anyway, a test.
I knew that. Every rookie reporter knows he or she is going to be tested in one way or the other. I didn’t care. I was confident in my writing skills, and I knew that wouldn’t be the last boring summary of a city council agenda I would write. City government was my new beat.
Plus, I’d been writing agenda summaries regularly for a weekly paper and before that on my college paper for a few years already, so, why wouldn’t daily papers do the same?
But I won’t lie. Sometimes I questioned the boringness of it. After I got to know my beat a little better and started writing city council articles regularly, I found those past articles handy little references for later events that occurred as a result of the actions taken in those meetings. That’s pretty much what this chapter is about. We have questioned how long it took the Israelites to make their way across the wilderness, and here Moses tells us exactly how it went down. We have to kind of use our imaginations as to how long each leg of the journey took, but because Moses recorded everything about the camp – size, numbers, formation – we can begin to visualize this massive march to the Promised Land. If you’re a reporter (or historian, or typesetter, or scholar or …[insert all kinds of copywriting jobs]) struggling with writing the “boring” articles, take heart! Your words have meaning. Will millions of people read them like the Bible? No. But someone will.
Writing prompt: agenda
Write out your agenda for the day, whether it’s finished or just beginning. If your day is wrapping up, jot down details of what you did, where you went, who you talked to. If your day is just getting started, write out what you’d like to accomplish, plan to do, who you might see. Notice where your priorities were/are. Pray over your day and dedicate it to Jesus.
jugglingfire.com 