In some tenement yards and subdivided houses, the walls between one family and the next are little more than board or zinc. You hear everything. The baby who won’t settle. The couple arguing about money. The cough that has gone on for weeks. The mother who thinks everyone is asleep and cries quietly at the kitchen sink. Sound travels through thin walls, and so does suffering.
Those of us who live in more comfortable homes rarely hear it. Our walls are thicker, our gates are higher, and our lives run along different roads. But the groaning is there, and Scripture tells us plainly that God hears it.
A people worn down
The opening chapters of Exodus describe a people who had once been welcomed in Egypt and were now enslaved there. Pharaoh, afraid of their numbers, made their lives bitter with hard labour “in mortar, in brick” (Exodus 1:14, NKJV). It is worth noticing what the work was. God’s people were forced to build houses and store cities for someone else while their own homes were places of fear. Worst of all, Pharaoh ordered their baby boys to be killed. The grief in those homes is almost impossible to imagine.
Years passed. Then comes this short passage:
“The children of Israel groaned because of the bondage, and they cried out; and their cry came up to God because of the bondage. So God heard their groaning, and God remembered His covenant… And God looked upon the children of Israel, and God acknowledged them.” (Exodus 2:23-25, NKJV)
Four verbs: God heard, remembered, looked and acknowledged. In the next chapter He speaks to Moses from the burning bush and says, “I have surely seen the oppression of My people… and have heard their cry… for I know their sorrows” (Exodus 3:7). The rescue was not quick. But the God who hears was already at work.
The groaning we might not hear
Hard housing takes many forms, and much of it is hidden. Consider a family of five sharing a single room, the children doing homework on the bed because there is no table. Or an elderly man renting a back room with no proper toilet, afraid to complain in case he is put out. Or a young woman in a city abroad, working two jobs, paying most of her wages for a damp flat with mould on the ceiling. Or a family whose house was badly damaged in a storm and who are still living under tarpaulin months later because there is no money to repair it.
These are not moral failures. They are the result of low wages, high rents, family breakdown, illness, disaster, and sometimes plain exploitation. People in them often feel ashamed and invisible. Many stop asking for help because they have asked before and nothing happened.
When the groaning goes deeper
For some families, poor housing is tangled up with deeper trauma: the loss of a child, violence in the home, a history that repeats itself across generations. The pain in Exodus was of this kind, and the text does not rush past it. If you are carrying grief or trauma like that, it is right to cry out to God, and it is also right to seek help from people trained to walk with you, such as a counsellor, a doctor or a trusted pastor. If you are not safe where you are living, please contact the emergency services or a local support organisation. God’s care often reaches us through people who are equipped to help.
Learning to hear as God hears
If God heard, remembered, looked and acknowledged, His people are called to do the same. A few ways churches and households can begin:
- Ask, and then listen. Housing need is rarely announced from the pulpit. A quiet, non-judgemental question after service (“How are things at home?”) can open a door.
- Look properly. Visit people where they live. It is easy to pray for “the needy” and never see a single room.
- Offer skills, not only money. A retired carpenter can fix a door. A member who works in an office can help someone fill in a housing application. Someone with a vehicle can help a family move.
- Be a fair landlord. If you rent out property, make sure your own tenants are not the ones groaning. Repairs, fair rents and respect are a witness in themselves.
- Speak up. Where housing is unsafe or people are being exploited, believers can support those affected in approaching the right authorities or advocates.
The God who comes down
At the burning bush God said, “So I have come down to deliver them” (Exodus 3:8, NKJV). He did not shout instructions from a distance. He came down. And then He sent Moses, a man who had once lived in a palace, back to the brick pits.
Perhaps that is the invitation for those of us in comfortable houses: to come down, to listen at the partition wall, and to let the groaning of others become our concern as it is God’s. The rescue may not be easy or quick. But it begins with being willing to hear.
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