The Story of Israelites and Moses Complaining

Numbers 11:10-35

On Thanksgiving, Beth was standing in the kitchen waiting impatiently for the turkey to cook. "I can't stand it!" Beth complained to her mother. "I want turkey now! Why can't it be done?"
"Now, now, Dear One," Beth's mother chided her. "It does no good to be impatient. Besides, you have to be careful what you wish for, because you might just get it!"
"What do you mean, mother?" asked Beth. "If I didn't want turkey, I wouldn't be asking for it."
"Let me tell you a story about that, Dear One," said her mother. And as she carefully removed the fruit-filled gelatin from her Sacred Heart Jesus Jell-o Mold (tm), this is the story she told:

One day Moses heard that everyone was crying. That made God mad, and it upset Moses.
Moses said to God, "Why did you do this to me? Why are you so mad at me that you made me responsible for all these people? Are they all my children? Should I carry them all against my chest and breast feed them? Where am I supposed to get meat to feed these people? I can't deal with this. It's too much. If you want me to handle this, you might as well just kill me now."
God answered Moses, "Get seventy old Israelites that people look up to and bring them to the temple to stand next to you. I'll come down and talk to you and give your responsibility to them so that you don't have to be responsible alone. Then tell the people that they'll have meat tomorrow because they asked me for it. Tell them they'll have so much meat that it will come out of their noses because they complained so much."
"There's 600,000 men here," said Moses. "Where am I going to find that much meat? Should we eat our sheep and cows? Should we get all the fish out of the ocean?"
"Do you think my hand is a waxy stump?" asked God. "Just wait and see."
So Moses went out and told the people what God told him to tell them. He also got seventy men together like he was supposed to. When God met the seventy men at the temple, they started to talk about holy stuff and wouldn't shut up.
There were two men in the camp named Eldad and Medad that God visited although they weren't in the temple, and they talked about holy things in the camp.
A young man ran up to Moses and said, "Eldad and Medad are saying holy stuff."
Joshua, the son of one of Moses' servants, said, "You can't let them do that, Moses."
"Do you think I'm jealous?" Moses answered. "I wish that everyone said holy stuff all the time."
Moses went with the seventy old men into the camp.
Just then, there was a big wind and quails blew in from the ocean and fell all over camp. There were so many quails that you could travel for a whole day in any direction without seeing the last of them and they were about three feet deep.
The people spent a couple of days gathering up all the quail. There were so many quail that even the people who got the fewest quail got ten. When the people started to eat them, God got mad and made everyone sick so that a bunch of the people died.

Beth thought about this for a moment. "If there were 600,000 men in the camp, and each one had a wife and a child, then that's about 1,800,000 people. And if everyone caught at least ten quail, then there about than 18 million quail, and that's assuming that everyone only got ten and that none of them got away. But," Beth continued after taking a deep breath, "if so many quail died all at the same time in the desert, shouldn't there be a big pile of bones? Why hasn't anyone found it?"
"I think you're missing the point," said her mother.
"I guess you're right," said Beth, a little winded. "The point is that I'm going to be eating leftover turkey until I'm sick of it, right?" Then she smiled and hugged her mother. All her questions had been answered.