Serving with rigour

Here the word rigour means: harshness, severity, cruelty, to break apart, or fracture. Those sound pretty bad, but then I got to thinking about that last word, fracture. Any bone in our body that is broken, no matter how serious a brake, is technically a fracture and generally speaking it can be healed. There is pain involved but it can get better.
In our text the children of Israel are going through a very long and extended rough time in their lives. The enemy is doing their best to hurt them and get them to surrender to their will and that is not unlike us. No we may not have it as bad they did but in our comfortable modern world anything that upsets the balance in our lives can be traumatic. Our enemy wants us to fracture to break to serve with rigour so that we quit, but God also wants us to serve with rigour so that we come together. Persecution has always helped the true church to grow. Israel went down to Egypt with 70 people and came out with 2-3 million. How much will we grow through our experience?