Songs of Exodus Remind Us We Are Pilgrims
Seventh grade is rough.
If you know someone who absolutely loved seventh grade, you also know a lot of people who don’t like that person.
You are fully aware of yourself and your place in the social order. You know exactly what you aren’t wearing that everyone else is. What you don’t have that everyone else has. What you can’t do that everyone else can.
And because seventh graders are so insecure about their own deficiencies, they can be very quick to point out everyone else’s.
Songs of Exodus Speak to Life’s Difficult Seasons
When you’re in seventh grade, it’s the oldest you’ve ever been. You have no experience being any older, you can’t really imagine it and, without ever saying it out loud, it just seems like this is your life now, and it will be like this forever.
I have dropped all three of my daughters off at the gates of that lion’s den, and it is the most powerless feeling in the world.
Our youngest daughter, Charlotte, is an amazing kid. She is riotously funny, fiercely compassionate, and a deep thinker. She loves to write and sing and can read the same book ten times over, finding something new in it every time. She lives with her eyes wide open. Amazing traits that unfortunately make you extra aware of your middle school experience.
Third kids get a lot of leftovers and hand-me-downs, but they also get parents who have actually done this before, so it was not until dropping Charlotte off that I finally had the experience to say:
“Okay, here’s the deal: Seventh grade is a lot of things. There will be days that are incredibly hard, and days where this is really fun! Whatever the day is, it will not last forever. Each day will end and you get to come back home.”
“See all these girls,” I continued, pointing at the green-skirted students making their way up the sidewalk. “You are all in a boat together, floating down the same river. Rainy days, sunny days, still water or rapids. It doesn’t actually matter what anybody’s wearing. You’re all on a journey you didn’t ask for, but you’re together, and someday you will all get out of the boat together too. If you can remember this, it will help you savor the good days and get through the hard ones. You’ve got this!”
To be honest, I don’t know if this was the advice she needed to hear, or that I was trying to send down some magical, Styrofoam cup phone line back through time to when I thought I was trapped in a lonely year that I thought would never end myself.
Songs of Exodus Point Believers Toward Hope
One of my favorite hymnals in my collection is full of Negro spirituals, handed down from people who were enslaved on plantations. They are usually built around multiple repetitions, substituting one word or phrase with each new verse. These were mostly simple songs, rarely written down until much later.
Contrary to our modern worship catalog, the core of these songs is mourning (for good reason), and what joy we hear is based in hope for the future. These words are from “Soon-a Will Be Done”:
Soon-a will be done-a with the troubles of the world.
Goin’ home to live with God.
No more weeping and a-wailing,
I’m goin’ to live with God.
These songs hold little mention of how God’s love makes us feel.
Songs of Exodus Reveal Our Longing for Home
They are songs of exodus, of people who know that they are not home, but are holding on to hope that they will be there one day.
There are moments where my grief or pain can resonate on these frequencies. I can feel the ache and longing in my bones. (The older I get, the more naturally this comes.) When I am hanging out, grilling burgers, and playing campfire songs with my friends, though, not so much.
We exist in a unique place on the timeline of human geography. By that I mean, ours is one of the only cultures in the history of the world that has not lived with the expectation of pain and difficulty.
Here in the modern West, we view trial as an exception. Washing machines, fast food, Wi-Fi, and office jobs have removed us from the long, hard drudgery our ancestors went through just to stay alive. In many ways, this is a gift and a mercy. But watch out. Trouble must be around the corner for anyone getting too comfortable in a place that is, in the end, deeply un-comfortable.
God is not trying to keep this a secret from us.
Songs of Exodus and the Promise of Home
One of the books in the Bible is called Exodus, meaning “a departure of a large group of people.” It feels like almost every other page in the rest of the Bible references this. The story of the Israelites, God’s chosen people, wandering through the desert on the way to their promised homeland, ends up being one of the biggest stories of the Old Testament, if not the whole Bible.
The spiritual “Go Down Moses” sings of this:
When Israel was in Egypt’s land,
Let my people go,
oppressed so hard they could not stand,
Let my people go.
Go down, Moses, way down in Egypt’s land,
tell old Pharaoh: Let my people go.
When Jesus was born, His parents soon had to take Him and hide in another country, as the king, who was threatened by rumors of the birth of the Messiah, was having all the baby boys in the region put to death.
Years later, when He had begun His ministry, a scribe said he wanted to follow Him. Jesus replied with this cryptic line: “Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head” (Luke 9:58). In His ministry, He traveled from town to town and wanted the scribe to understand that following Jesus was signing up for an altogether different kind of life. Pledging a new allegiance to a new citizenship.
Songs of Exodus Challenge How Christians Live Today
Deep down, even in our comfort, our transformed hearts understand this too. We feel the push of one world and the pull of the next, and we know we don’t belong here.
The endless scroll of our phones is telling us there is more. The constant grind to achieve is telling us there must be rest. The knowledge that we will all die will either give us utter terror or sweet hope that there is life, and life more abundantly than any we have yet seen or experienced.
Just like seventh grade is not forever, this life, as it is right now, is not our home.
On Jordan’s stormy banks I stand,
and cast a wishful eye
to Canaan’s fair and happy land,
where my possessions lie.
I am bound for the promised land.
—“On Jordan’s Stormy Banks I Stand,” Samuel Stennett, 1787
Does this change how we think and pray and go about our days? What we prioritize and how we treat the homeless and the environment and the voting booth? Does it change the way we practice our faith and the songs we sing?
If we want to be like Christ, are we willing to live in the reality that we are pilgrims? Foreigners in a foreign land. God’s chosen people, homesick for a new heaven and a new earth.
Could we sing again the songs of exodus?
Excerpt from How To Remember: Forgotten Pathways to an Authentic Faith by Andrew Osenga (© 2025). Published by Moody Publishers. Used by permission.
ANDREW OSENGA is a songwriter, musician, record producer, and the leader of Anchor Hymns, a multi-generational community of artists creating new sacred songs for the church. He has worked extensively with Grammy and Dove award winning artists like Andrew Peterson, Steven Curtis Chapman, Jars of Clay, Sandra McCracken, and Caedmon’s Call. Beyond music, he can be found writing weekly on his popular faith and culture Substack and on his podcast, The Pivot. Andrew lives in Nashville with his wife and daughters and hikes at Radnor Lake every morning he can.
