Reflection 1 | Week 1 | The Quiet Life in Midian

Welcome to Week 1, Reflection 1, in our guided study through the book of Exodus,

looking at the life of Moses.

To find out more about this study, or follow along in your own book,

visit www.northsidcc.org.

Reflection 1. The Quiet Life in Midian.

Exodus 3, verses 4-6. When the Lord saw that he had gone over to look,

Exodus 3:4–6

God called to him from within the bush, Moses, Moses.

And Moses said, Here I am. Do not come any closer, God said.

Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground.

Then he said, I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham,

the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.

At this, Moses hid his face because he was afraid to look at God.

We say it instinctively. Nobody's perfect. It works like a release valve.

The pressure drops, expectations lower, anxiety recedes.

In a single phrase, we grant ourselves permission to stop striving.

But that relief reveals something deeper. Many of us have quietly settled into

a version of the spiritual life that asks very little of us.

Not because we rejected God, nothing so dramatic.

We simply arrived at a place that felt stable and safe. We go to church,

we believe the right things, we are kind to our neighbors.

If somebody asked, we would say that were doing fine, and we would mean it.

This is not hypocrisy. It is something more subtle.

It is a life that has stopped expecting more, not out of rebellion,

but out of a slow, unnoticed fatigue.

At some point, the spiritual life began to feel like a project that we had mostly completed.

Or worse, a standard we could never meet. So we quietly lowered it until the

guilt became manageable.

Two different roads, but the same ledge.

Either way, the result is the same. we stopped climbing. We found a ledge and we sat down.

We call it contentment, often into something else.

Not merely an emotional state of satisfaction, but a more deliberate decision,

one quietly imposed by our own will.

This isn't a new mindset. In fact, some 3,500 years ago, a man named Moses was living in Midian.

Exodus tells us that when he was a young man, he fled Egypt,

fled the violence he had committed there, fled the identity he could not reconcile.

And in the desert, he had consented to build something real.

He has a wife, a family, a father-in-law who respects him, sheep that need tending.

His life is honest, faithful, and small.

By every ordinary measure, Moses is a good man with a stable existence.

He is not in crisis. He is not wandering.

He has done what many of us have done. He has found a life that works and settled

into it. Then the bush burns.

Not a wildfire, not destruction. A flame that does not consume.

Something that should not be happening and Moses turns aside to look.

That turning is everything.

He did not go looking for God that morning. He went looking for his sheep.

But something caught his eye that refused to fit inside his ordinary world and he turned toward it.

God speaks. The ground becomes holy.

Moses is told to remove his sandals. And his first instinct,

before courage, before obedience, before anything resembling faith, is hesitation.

Who am I that I should go? It is not a bad question. It's an honest one.

Moses knows his own limitations. He knows what he has done. He knows what he has not.

And standing before something infinite and burning, he is quite certain that

this is a job for someone else, a professional better equipped for the task.

You may be holding this study with a similar instinct. A summer devotional through Exodus?

It sounds meaningful, and part of you wants it, But another part hesitates.

You are busy. You are tired.

You're not sure you're the kind of person who goes deeper.

You have a life that works. Why disrupt it?

The bush does not answer that question the way we expect.

God does not tell Moses he is sufficient. He does not hand him a plan that resolves every fear.

He says something far stranger and far better. I will be with you.

The invitation is not to adequacy. It is to presence.

And it begins, as it always does, with a willingness to turn aside from the ordinary and look.

This study is a small turning aside, a few minutes each week,

a willingness to look at something that burns without being consumed and to

ask whether there might be more to this life than you have settled for.

Not because that life is bad, but because God is not finished with you in it.

You do not need to be ready. Moses was not ready. You only need to be willing to take off your shoes.

People come to a moment like this from different places. Some of you are not

here because you need convincing.

You arrive already hungry, not asking whether to disrupt your life,

but asking how far this goes.

Moses has an answer for you, too. He ends up on the mountain asking to see God's

glory. The bush was just the beginning.

Questions for Reflection Question 1.

Where do you see people commonly settling into something comfortable in their spiritual life?

2. When have you noticed yourself settling into something comfortable?

Not wrong, but no longer growing.

3. What is your honest reaction to being invited into something deeper this summer?

What does your hesitation reveal about what you believe God expects of you?

Deep Dive This is from the first story in the narrative of Exodus,

where two women named Shipra and Pua decide to resist the commands of Pharaoh

and do not harm the Hebrew male children like they are commanded.

Pharaoh is the most powerful man in the ancient world, yet Exodus refuses to give us his name.

Instead, the first name the story remembers are Shipra and Pua,

two midwives, two women standing at the bottom of Egypt's social hierarchy,

and somehow they become the first real resistance movement in Exodus.

In the ancient world, you did not defy Pharaoh. It wasn't merely a political

ruler. He was treated like a divine authority.

His word defined morality, truth, and order, and yet these women quietly live

as though there was a higher law above him.

Before Moses ever confronts Pharaoh in public, Shipra and Pua have already challenged

him in private. The Hebrew grammar is ambiguous here.

Most modern translations have these women as themselves Hebrew,

but the Septuagint and Vulgate read a little different, as Egyptian midwives

assigned to oversee Hebrew births.

On the ancient reading, the story becomes even more provocative.

Outsiders recognizing the evil of Pharaoh more clearly than many inside the system.

Either way, their courage is unmistakable. They don't organize a revolution.

They don't deliver speeches.

They simply refuse to participate in what they know is wrong.

The maneuver around the decree with subversive wisdom. The Hebrew women give

birth before we arrive, they claimed.

They become the first act of real resistance in Exodus.

Not with plagues or parted seas, but with two ordinary women deciding that there

are some orders no decree can make legitimate.