Lesson 13: Bondage, passover and exodus

It's one of those parts of being human: we look around ourselves and see the greatness in others. That friend is so much smarter than me. This friend seems to always have such great confidence that he can manage pretty much anything. This friend has such great spiritual power. This one has such a great relationship with his wife and kids. That would be paradise. If only I could have a sliver of what they have, I might be able to manage - but I don't. Life is hard.

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Yet, at the same time and surely completely unknown to us, those same friends look at us and have similar longings. Maybe they wish to have our patience, our ability to deal with burdens, our ability to love, even our ability to run. Whatever it is, it seems to be a human condition: everybody thinks everybody else has things together better than us.

And at the same time, we judge ourselves to be inadequate, inferior, incapable and undeserving.

Moses thought that way too.

So I'm reading in Exodus chapter 3, and it's surprising how quickly this chapter moves. They pretty much made a 2 hour movie out of a few verses in this chapter. Pretty good movie too - by the way.

Here's some back story. The Lord brings Moses out of Egypt, sets him up with a wife, then tells him "Hey, you're going to bring all of the Israelites out of Egypt". Moses knows that the Israelites are like - more than you can count. He knows that the Egyptians rely on that labor to keep their economy going. He knows there's not enough money in the world to buy their freedom, and he's not exactly in good graces with the Egyptians - the first thing they'll want to do when they see him is to kill him. This is not a great setup. It sounds like something akin to "charge of the light brigade", only to Moses it had to sound like "Moses walks into a herd of zombies". He had to know that by himself, he could only hope for being killed less brutally.

The thing is - Moses wasn't by himself. And neither are we. How often do we get a church calling. I suppose it doesn't matter the calling. Maybe it's the nursery leader, maybe it's teaching the 7 year olds, or teenagers. Maybe it's teaching the adults in school, or maybe it's bishop. No madda. Are we up to it? Are we ready?

Of course not. We're not capable of doing any calling well on our own. If we look to our own skill set, we'll fail. And I do believe that it is those who rely on their own skill sets in any calling that are most dangerous. But when we rely on the Lord, things change. Suddenly you take a man with a bounty on his head, who doesn't speak well, a fugitive, and he becomes a prophet. Was he ready? By human standards, of course he wasn't. That didn't matter to the Lord - the Lord made up the difference.

But why? How did our Father know that he could choose Moses? The answer might be in verse 4. "And when the Lord saw that he turned aside to see, God called unto him out of the mist of the bush, and he said, Moses, Moses. And he said, Here am I."

There could be a discussion about what turning aside to see means, but that's out of the scope of this thought, and I don't think I go deep enough to lead that discussion. I do think the key point here though is the last sentence "And he said, Here am I."

I think that's all the Lord needs when he calls us to any position, title or level of authority. He knows what we can do, he knows where we can go with his help. All he needs is willingness from us. "Here am I."

The Lord needs us to be a million dollar bill for him. We're ten cents at the moment. Is that enough? It is under two conditions: 1) we trust the Lord, and 2) we're willing to be used.

"Here am I" is a beautiful phrase. It can apply when you're driving past someone with a flat tire. It can apply when a customer or client needs to be served well. It can apply when life tries to overwhelm us. It can apply when life tries to overwhelm others around us.

May we all surrender our wills to the Lord. I believes it begins with a daily affirmation of "Here am I" to the Lord. And then - he may just return the favor.

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