So I was listening to a worship song at church today, Show Me Your Glory by Kim Walker, (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jd98Jkz9RUw) and I got to thinking about Moses; most likely because she mentions him in the beginning of the song. Nonetheless, Moses saw God in a burning bush. While living in the desert Moses would have seen many burning bushes throughout the day. Maybe it was as common as seeing a squirrels running around our neighborhoods. However, Moses was paying such attention to the bush that he noticed it was on fire but not burning up (Ex 3:2) AND he chose to investigate (Ex 3:3). It just made me think about how much attention Moses paid to his surroundings. It seems that it would have been easy for Moses to just walk passed yet another burning bush and paid no attention to the bush. Yet walking by the bush would have caused Moses to miss out on an encounter with God. So how many times do we run through life so fast, and so focused on our own agenda that we miss a burning bush? Something that God is trying to tell us and show us or someone who is in need of some assistance. I think that there are tons of burning bushes around us, if we would only pause to pay attention and notice our surroundings.
Which then led me to think about Samuel, in 1 Samuel 3, when the Lord is calling to Samuel in the night. Three times the Lord calls to Samuel, Samuel did not know that it was the Lord and thus The Lord did not speak to Samuel. It was only when Samuel answered The Lord, did The Lord speak. It just boggles my mind that God could have spoken to Samuel the whole time, yet He waited. He waited to make sure that He had Samuel’s undivided attention and that Samuel knew whose voice he was listening to. And, I think that happens a lot to us today as well. I think that God is trying to talk to us, and that we want to hear Him, BUT we are too caught up in ourselves, in not knowing how to respond and in not knowing where the voice is coming from because it’s not the way we expected to hear His voice. Yet, when we do respond, God is so willing to share with us, to guide us and to direct us. And I wonder how many times God has called out to me, wanting to tell me something, but I have not heard Him.
I’ve been feeling, at least for myself, that people want a fast food God. They want the short answer, the big lightning bolt answer, the burning bush in the middle of a snow storm, and the voice that speaks so loudly that the whole room can hear it. But, that’s not what God wants. He loves us no matter what, His grace is enough and He desires a relationship with us. He doesn’t want to give us the topical band-aid fix so that we can breeze past it and move right on to the next thing. He doesn’t want to stitch it up either….no, He wants to remove the infection, rebuild where it used to be and fill us up with something to make it even stronger. God’s in it for the long haul with us. He wants to know that we desire to build that relationship with Him, to hear His voice in the dead of the night, to see Him in the mundane, and to recognize Him for who He is.
