Counting Sheep?

So Moses thought: I must go over and look at this remarkable sight. Why isn’t the bush burning up?

When the Lord saw that he had gone over to look, God called out to him from the bush, “Moses, Moses!”

“Here I am,” he answered. Exodus 3:3,4

Sometimes God picks unlikely people for a mission. Sometimes He picks likely people, but instead of turning them loose on the project, He seems to abandon them. Moses, back in the day, was a likely guy. He had been adopted into Pharaoh’s family. He was one of the elite. Legend has it that he was a successful military leader. If I had been God, I would have arranged a coup and put Moses in charge of Egypt. It would have been much simpler.

Instead, Moses winds up a murderer who flees his homeland and is exiled to the backside of the desert, not just the wilderness -- that would have been bad enough – but the desert’s ass. It’s only one rung above New Jersey on the descent to hell.

After forty years following stinking sheep Moses might have been justified in thinking the whole deliverer thing wasn’t working out all that well. Forty years is a lot of tempering and refining. I would wonder if, after all that time, God had not cast me aside and given up on me. I had my chance and I screwed it up royally. I stumbled. I fell from exalted – ok, well, not-so-exalted heights. It was more like I tripped over the threshold but it was still a fall. It still made God look bad. Now I am an outcast just wandering around doing what I can to survive until my miserable spark is extinguished.

But then every once in a while I see some phenomenon. I see a remarkable thing. The question is: will I turn aside as Moses did, or will I go on moseying along behind the sheep? Is it really that remarkable? After all, isn’t that what life is: a fire that burns but does not consume? Is it anything different than the wick of a lamp?

Even with Moses, perhaps other bushes had burned that he had not turned aside to see over the course of forty years. Could he have been too busy or too weary, too hungry, too thirsty, too eager to get home to see the family, or too bored with what looked like a failed life to bother?

I have seen the bush burning. Will I turn aside and get closer? That’s always the question. The remarkable and the mundane will intersect. At that crossroad I must decide to give heed to the remarkable or keep on following the familiar -- one day like another, one sheep like another -- repetitive, familiar. To turn aside and draw closer to the remarkable is the path out of the desert, out of abandonment, out of emptiness.

I will suddenly realize I am on holy ground. I will see the fire for what it is – not some chemical reaction, but the very Spirit of God coming through a common frame. Any old bush will do. It is not the bush that is remarkable. The bush can be well-formed or scraggly and half dead. It doesn’t matter. It is the Fire I have turned aside to see. There I will hear God, at last, at long last, call my name.

He calls my name. He has not forsaken me. He was waiting only for me to turn away from the hypnotic day-to-day dream state, waiting for me to turn to Him, to the Real.

If I find myself complaining that I have no sense of purpose, no mission in life, and no urgent calling, the problem is not that God has overlooked or abandoned me. It is that I have ignored a world on fire but not consumed. I have just kept on counting sheep.