Turn Aside and See

The 47 comes at 7:12 and at 7:31 and if you get the 7:31 you stand, and everybody at that stop knows this and organizes their whole morning around it.

She gets the 7:12. She has got the 7:12 for a long time.

Left side, three from the back if she can. Bag on her lap. And then twenty two minutes happen and she is at the other end of them, and she could not tell you one thing about the road.

Not the shops. Not the church with the sign that somebody changes every week and always changes badly. Not the man who gets on at the fourth stop with the coat and the radio. Not the stretch where the road comes up and you can see the whole city with the light on it if you are looking left, which she is, and is not.

Twice a day, five days a week. It is a lot of hours to be nowhere.

And she is not troubled about the bus. She is troubled about what the bus is telling her, which is that she has become a woman who is not present anywhere, and that if God were doing something in front of her she would go straight past it at thirty miles an hour with her bag on her lap.

Come sit on this wall by the stop for a minute. Because there is a moment in Exodus with a shepherd in it and I want you to notice the exact sentence he says to himself.

He said it to himself before anything happened

Moses is forty years into being nobody. Keeping somebody else's sheep in the back of the desert. This is a man with no expectations left.

And there is a bush.

And Moses said, I will now turn aside, and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt.Exodus 3:3

Read that whole sentence, because it is a man talking to himself and it is the hinge of the entire book.

I will now turn aside. That is a decision to change direction, made before anybody had said anything to him. And look at what happens next, in the very next verse: when the LORD saw that he turned aside to see, God called unto him.

God speaks after the turning. Not before it.

Now hold that with the other half, which nobody thinks about. How long was that bush burning before Moses noticed? The text does not say, which means it could have been a while. It certainly did not start burning to catch a man who was already looking at it.

You are on a route where something has been burning before anybody walked over, and the turning aside came before the voice. That is not a clever reading of a famous chapter; Exodus 3:3 has Moses deciding to look and Exodus 3:4 has God calling after he does, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes the back of a desert in Midian and stands it up on the 7:12 with your bag on your lap. Nothing had to begin. Somebody had to turn.

Now the second thing, and I want to be careful because it is easy to hear this as pressure.

I am not telling you to be more observant on the bus. You cannot will yourself into noticing and you will exhaust yourself trying, and by Thursday you will be back to three from the back with your bag on your lap and feeling worse.

Turning aside is not straining. It is one small physical redirection. Moses walked a few steps off a path he was on. That is all he did. He did not summon anything and he did not concentrate.

You have something small and physical available to you rather than a state of mind you have to produce, and the man in that chapter only changed direction. The written word gives one action and one only in that verse, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes something that small carry weight rather than requiring an effort you do not have.

Forty years is not disqualifying, and the text says so out loud

One more thing, because it is under everything you have been thinking about yourself.

Moses was eighty. He had done forty years of being somebody and forty years of being nobody, and there is no indication in the text that he was in a good spiritual season. He was working. He was keeping sheep that were not his.

And the bush was for him.

There is no line in that chapter where God explains why He waited or comments on the state Moses was in. He calls his name twice and gets straight to the point.

You are not disqualified by a long flat stretch, and the man that bush was lit for had been keeping somebody else's sheep for forty years. Exodus 3:4 has God calling him by name with no preamble at all, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes the absence of a rebuke in an ancient text and makes it a real relief in a woman on a bus.

And here is the last piece, because you have a mouth and it does more than say thanks to the driver.

Jesus said in Matthew 17:20 that faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, is enough to move it. The smallest seed there is. Not how present you have managed to be this month. That a person opens their mouth and says what God has said. You have that standing because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and speaking is the appointed way this works. We flip the switch. He sends the current.