Moses … led his flock to the far side of the desert and came to Horeb, the mountain of God (Exodus 3:1).

Happy New Year, and welcome back to Connect Devotionals!  A new year begins, and a new sermon series: Restart!

As 2021 begins, a restart—a fresh start—really is something to long for, as a country, as a church, as a person.  2020, with its pandemic, political turmoil and ongoing racial and ethnic tensions, disrupted so much—we’re all longing for a restart.

So we begin with Moses, a man for whom a fresh start seems impossible.  He knows that he has some kind of call from the Almighty to set God’s people free from their slavery in Egypt.  He thought he knew how to go about that, so he killed one of the Egyptian slave masters, perhaps assuming that his bold action would inspire his people to take up arms and violently overthrow their oppressors.  They didn’t, and Moses had to run for his life.  He ended up herding sheep for his father-in-law.  From God’s man to hired hand, from Pharaoh’s courts to bovine snorts.

Did we mention it’s been forty years of shepherding?

Moses is “in the wilderness.”  Nearly everyone we meet in Scripture spends significant time in wilderness.  “Wilderness” does not refer primarily to your physical location as to the terrain your soul is having to traverse.  Wilderness means disruption, disorientation; it not only feels like you’ve lost your way, you’ve also lost your maps (and your phone isn’t getting any GPS signal).  Wilderness is not a pleasant walk in the woods or a refreshing time in nature, good as such things are; wilderness feels like you’ve lost track of God and, what is far worse, God has lost track of you.

But God has not lost track of anything, including you.  Wilderness is where God does some of his best work: needed work; refining work; aligning work; releasing-into-the-new work.  Wilderness is not punitive, it is preparatory.  It can feel endless, but it is in fact transitional.

So Moses thinks he’s on the back side of nowhere, leading his flocks “to the far side of the desert,” to a mountain called Horeb, which means “desolation.”  If you’re thinking “bleak,” you’re right.  Moses is not trying to “recover,” he is not looking for a “restart,” he’s just tending someone else’s sheep.  There’s no indication that God has been speaking to Moses, or that Moses has had much to say to God.

And then: a bush ablaze but not consumed.  A voice: you think you’re in the back side of nowhere, but you are in fact standing on holy ground.  And a calling renewed, but now transposed into a different key.

Wilderness is where we learn that what got us here may not be all that we need to get to God’s there.  Wilderness is where God meets us and adds to us what we will need “on the far side of the desert.”  That “far side” might be nearer than we thought, even though it’s been forty years.

Moses doesn’t know it yet, but he’s about to cross an unseen border into the call of God.

Wilderness can feel like “stuck” or “lost” or “unmoored, disconnected.”  Sometimes it may feel like “lying fallow.”    Did 2020 usher you into a wilderness of some kind?  How would you describe it?  What have been the indicators that God has not lost track of you?