Like Moses-Wandering and Waiting

I’m waiting for my own burning bush.  Like Moses this is my wilderness period.  Moses’ wilderness season is set in motion by his slaying an Egyptian.  My season is due (loosely) to a change in management.  Murder or management God is sovereign over all of it.

Certainly we are all as qualified as Moses, David and even Paul to accomplish some great spiritual work.  The Haystack prayer meeting is said to be responsible for launching the great missionary movement in the early 1800’s: 

“It was Mills' custom to spend Wednesday and Saturday afternoons in prayer with other students on the banks of the Hoosack River or in a valley near the college. In August, 1806, Mills and four others were caught in a thunderstorm while returning from their usual meeting. Seeking refuge under a haystack they waited out the storm and gave themselves to prayer. …Bowed in prayer, these first American student volunteers for foreign missions willed that God should have their lives for service wherever he needed them, and in that self-dedication really gave birth to the first student missionary society in America."  Kenneth Scott Latourette, the foremost historian of the church's worldwide expansion, states,  It was from this haystack meeting that the foreign missionary movement of the churches of the United States had an initial main impulse."

Moses, King David, and Paul; all murderers and David an adulterer on top of that.  We delude ourselves believing it was because they were brave and bold.  Not true.  Moses excused himself on grounds that he was, “slow of speech and slow of tongue.”  Paul’s testimony to the Corinthians was that he was “with you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling.”  On these grounds I am more than qualified for a fruit-bearing season.  

It’s the disruption, the waiting, the life upheaval that is the most difficult.  Yet Gods’ desire, His purpose, is wrought as much in the forty years of shepherding as in the forty years of wandering and waiting for the Promised Land. 

My own burning bush won’t be leading a nation or nailing thesis to a Wittenberg door.  It may be greater platform for my writing or greater opportunity to minister to my neighbors.  Meanwhile Midian is a harder place to live than the kings courts in Egypt.  I just have to trust in the loving kindnesses and sovereign care of the King.  Through it all I hope to gain the heart of Moses who “left Egypt, not fearing the wrath of the king; for he endured, as seeing Him who is unseen.”