Most of us learned Exodus as a children's story filled with plagues, a parted sea, and a man with a staff raised dramatically over the water. But read it slowly, and something else emerges. A fugitive who argues with a burning bush. A freed people who miss their chains. A wilderness where the bread shows up every morning and can't be stockpiled.

This September, we're spending four weeks in the story of Exodus because what happened in the desert is the story of what keeps happening to people who get honest about what holds them, what feeds them, and what they're really looking for.