Starlight - Introduction

Starlight

It was while we were ploughing through reading the prophecies of Ezekiel that I first met Starlight, a young girl growing up in the benighted land of Egypt.

How could I get any blessing in reading through these prophetic messages?

Wonderfully, God met me, giving me a glimpse of his heart of love even for these people who had been used to bring such terrible suffering to his chosen ones. As I read on, with my God-given imagination, I met a little Egyptian girl, named Starlight by her beloved grandfather, though her parents had named, and treated her as Little Mouse, implying that she was to be a servant of one of the lowest of the Egyptian gods.

The days of Egypt's greatness are long gone. The pyramids and other buildings of grandeur are all that remain as evidence of its one-time splendour. There are records of great victories and of their power over other nations, but in those days, there were but few scholars left who were able to read the wonderful hieroglyphics in which they were probably written.

The Egyptian army had been a power to be feared, but now, though they would make a great display of their prowess, it could not be denied that there were troops hired from other nations seen on their streets.

It was not in the heyday of the great nation of Egypt that this story has unfolded, but of a nation that had refused to acknowledge the great Jehovah God. He was the God who had confronted and brought to nought the power of each of their many gods through the plagues. Not only had this eventually brought the great Pharaoh to his knees, but it had also brought those wandering tribes together so that they had been welded into a mighty nation through their suffering and had eventually gone forth to become a people whose God was the Lord, the Lord Almighty.

But Israel now had a commission to bring God's love and light to the nations,

and, hidden away in our Bibles, we find the brave Ezekiel not only prophesying words of hope to Israel, now in exile, but also to the people of Egypt.

 

And so it is that God has shone light on a little Mouse' living in bondage in the benighted land, and her grandfather, a scholar and scribe who had faith to call her Starlight, and who is inspiring me to write this story, that we all might know that, however great our suffering or situation of hopelessness, we can look up to the heavens and find a God who will lighten our darkness and bring comfort to us in our grief.

I pray that as God has been inspiring me to write this story of what it must have been like to live in the land of Egypt when the brave Ezekiel dared, not only to speak out these prophetic words God was giving to him, but to record them and to see that they were sent across the lands, and centuries too, so that they may eventually make an impact on our lives too.

May we, too, find our hearts impacted and changed by the courage and obedience of this great man, Ezekiel, even as we allow our own gift of imagination to touch our lives. Whatever our circumstances, may we all find ourselves prisoners of hope.