Observation: This story of Moses is part of a longer speech in Acts 7, delivered by Stephen to the high priests in Jerusalem. It runs through the entire story of God's contact with the people of Israel, with the main point that prophets were always rejected in some way before ultimately being embraced (and Jesus will be the same way). But what struck me about this paragraph was that Moses fled from Egypt to the land of Midian at age 40. He got married, had kids, tended sheep, and mostly forgot about his people in Egypt for another forty years. Meaning he was 80 years old when God showed up for him in the burning bush. In almost every film adaptation (and even in the Exodus story) this long chunk of time is mostly glossed over. I know in the animated film "Prince of Egypt" Moses is still looking pretty spry post-burning bush. In reality, Moses spent half a lifetime comfortably minding his business, until God called on him to do what we all remember him for doing.
Application: Hearing this, I can't help thinking of my hero, Carl Fredericksen, from my favorite Pixar film, "Up." As a child, Carl meets Ellie, a spunky little neighbor girl who shares his sense of adventure, and they grow up together, fall in love, get married, and live a comfortable, happy life, always planning that one day they'll go on a great adventure to "Paradise Falls." In one of the most gut-wrenching montage sequences in all of animated cinema, Carl loses Ellie after decades of happy marriage. He's about to be forcibly taken to a nursing home when he makes his escape, tying thousands of balloons to his house and taking to the sky, finally having the adventure of a lifetime in his golden years.
So, my 36th birthday is in a couple weeks. Many who are reading this will probably roll your eyes and say, "Oh, cry me a river, you young whippersnapper", and I'm ready for that. I'm going to say this anyway: my experience of my thirties is that it's the decade of your life when you realize that time does fly. You start to look at where you wanted to be, and what you wanted to do, and realize it doesn't just happen on its own. You start to ask yourself if you're really doing what God has called you to do, and making the best use of the years God has given you so far. Am I making a difference, the way I wanted to? Am I making each day count?
You can take this line of thought way too far, and I am definitely guilty of that now and again. As Soren Kierkegaard wrote, "Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards." You'll never really know the impact you've had, or what God was really doing with you, until it's already done. Obsessing about it does not help. But also, the impact you will make, you will make on God's timetable, not your own. Abraham was 75 when he was called to leave the land where he was raised, to go to the land God promised. Sarah was 90 when Isaac was born. And good old Moses, everyone's favorite late bloomer, was 80 by the time he even started to think that maybe God could use him, given his former position of privilege, to help hundreds of thousands of his enslaved kinsfolk, and even then, it took a burning bush to get him going. What God wills for us will happen, and when God calls us to be part of something, sooner or later, God will figure out a way to get us going. Constantly worrying about having missed the bus will only distract us from the many busses God sends our way.
Prayer: God, thank you for the witness of Moses, the late bloomer who finally heard your voice. May I hear too, in your time, not mine. Amen.
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