Please note that the content and viewpoints of Mr. Hansen are his own and are not necessarily those of the C.S. Lewis Foundation. We have not edited his writing in any substantial way and have permission from him to post his content.

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Dear Friends:

Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian; he led his flock beyond the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed. Then Moses said, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up.” When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” Then he said, “Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” He said further, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God” (Ex. 3:1-6).

This the first of a series of messages on Moses’ experience with the burning bush. I wrote these meditations five years ago, but I have been reflecting on the story again for lessons on leadership.

A prince became an exile. A talented, but proud and brash man found himself alone on the far edge of the wilderness tending someone else’s sheep. It took forty years of triumph and forty more years of humbling mundane labor for the man to come to the place where he could see God in a bush.

We look for God in the extraordinary. Celebrity testimony is prized. Left to our human devices, we would place Moses at the top of the government where he could wield influence and witness for God, but God would develop the leader before placing him in leadership.

What could Moses do for God in the palace of the Pharaoh? He could change the course of history, but only on his second visit after a long apprenticeship of desolation. His vision changed looking for forage and water for sheep in a land of rocks and sand. He came to consider “abuse suffered for the Christ to be greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt, for he was looking ahead to the reward” (Heb 11-26).

Moses came to see grace in the ordinary. He turned off the beaten path to look for God. He was willing to take off his shoes to feel the reality of gritty sand and sharp rocks made holy by the presence of the Lord. The former man of authority and action, learned to pray in the desert. He bowed his head and covered his face in reverence for the God who brought him to new life in the heritage of blessing. He was now ready to lead God’s people. There is much for us to learn from his experience.

The monks of the Monastery of St. Catherine’s on Mount Sinai have claimed for 1600 years that they house the real “burning bush” on their grounds. It’s a raspberry-like, brambly, fast growing shrub from the mountains of Central Asia belonging to the species Rubus Sanctus. It’s very rare in the desert. The monks believe that its red berries appeared to Moses to be flames, but the monastery’s bush doesn’t bear fruit so the alleged conditions cannot be replicated. The monks argue over whether their bush sprouted from the root system of the bush that Moses saw or was replanted in the tenth century at its current location. In any case, they venerate the bush and water and fertilize it with goat droppings.

A fascinating account of the Monastery’s claim was written by Bruce Feiler in Walking the Bible [New York: HarperCollins, 2001, p. 224-248]. Feiler describes his visit to the bush in colorful terms.

Directly across the walkway was a rounded stone wall about ten feet high that looked as if it were made of peanut brittle. Sprouting from the top was an enormous, fountaining bush. The plant was about six feet tall, with large, dangling branches like a weeping willow that sprouted from the center like a cheap wig. A white cat with a brown splotch around one eye was perched at the base of the bush, and off to the side was a slightly out-of-date fire extinguisher. A fire extinguisher? At first I thought it was an eyesore, but then I realized the unintended humor. Was this in case the burning bush caught on fire? (p. 229).

After 3100 years, transplantation and being cut down to the roots in 1948 when the monks thought it looked sickly, one would expect to find any vestiges of the Divine’s presence in the bush to be eradicated.

Who really knows if the monastery bush is the bush or it is just some brush transformed for the moment by the fire of God’s presence. The places where we find God are pretty ordinary. For me it was a window seat in economy class on an American Airlines flight between Chicago and Ontario, California on a Thursday afternoon. God revealed himself to a desperate friend in a lily growing up in the middle of a back-yard lawn. Another friend experienced him as a child in a Cuban pasture. God’s revelation is not limited by time or place or our expectations.

The key to revelation isn’t the place of encounter. It is in the vision of an observer open to the possibilities of God. Driving home from work one afternoon in the early spring, I was delighted to find the bare Southern California hills clothed in emerald green with white clouds spilling over the ridge lines and running down into the canyons. I called a friend on my cell phone. “Do you see the clouds on the  hills?”

“Yes”

“I think this is what David was talking about when he said, ‘The mountains skipped like rams, the hills, like lambs'(Ps. 114:4). Do you see it?”

“No.”

“Don’t you see the white clouds pouring over the hills?”

“Yes.”

“Doesn’t it make you think of a flock of sheep running across a pasture?”

“Not really.”

“Oh well, it does to me and I think it’s great.”

“Well, that’s nice.”

Frustrated, I called another friend who was driving home. She saw the clouds on the hills but couldn’t see the rams and lambs in them. I am still sad that their hearts could not read the poetry of God on that spring afternoon.

It takes undistracted eyes to read that poetry. On another windy day, I drove to a church league softball game. My five-year-old son was by my side. We were stopped at a red light when he said, “Look, Daddy, the trees are talking to each other.”

“What do you mean?”

He pointed up to the Chinese elms, eucalyptus, pepper trees, and palms that were leaning in close to each other in the wind like friends sharing confidences.

“You’re right, little man. They are talking to each other. It’s like the song we sing.

The trees are gently swaying,
swaying, swaying;
The trees are gently swaying,
saying God is love.

He nodded his head, “yes,” and kept watching in deep thought as we drove down the street.

In her poem Aurora Leigh, Elizabeth Barrett Browning famously made the point that it’s our perceptual set that causes us to miss God.

Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes,
The rest sit around it and pluck blackberries,
And daub their natural faces unaware
More and more from the first similitude.

When he saw the burning bush, Moses was eighty years old, approaching middle age in a time when humans lived much longer. When he had come into the desert, he was a shamed forty-year-old exile, rejected by his people when he had taken a violent stand for them. He lost his privilege and power as a prince of Egypt. He found work and life as a tribal sheepherder. He passed by a lot of bushes over the next forty years, but I doubt he noticed them at first. He was too focused on the raw inflammation of his loss–too consumed by the “What ifs” of his dreams and ambitions denied. He had spent his life as an achiever in the most advanced society in the world up to that time. His mind was filled with engineering concepts, military strategies, political intrigues, and the mannered protocols of life in the Pharaoh’s court. He was seized by grief over what might have been.

Forty years of blowing sand and rough ground, hot days and cold nights, chasing dumb sheep, looking for water in arid wastes, experiencing the humility of parenting, and coming to treasure the precious simplicity of a spouse’s smile and a child’s laughter, gave Moses new eyes and an appreciation for where God might be found.

Jesus said, “I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind” (John 9:39). He said this to religious persons who thought they had everything figured out. Moses must have thought he had it all figured out when he killed an Egyptian for beating a Hebrew and sought to adjudicate disputes between his own people. But he became afraid of the truth of the murder becoming known and he fled from Pharaoh’s retribution into the desert (Ex 2:11-15).

Like every human, Moses would enter his alienation thinking he could see because of his fears, beliefs and attachments. We think our fears help us see and protect us. Moses was a palace-trained individual from an urban society. There was plenty for him to fear in the desert. We know he was afraid of snakes (Ex 4:3). Having committed murder, he would fear the same fate in a lawless, desolate place of nomads. He had held power and position. He would fear uselessness and oblivion. He had been fed and clothed as royalty. He would fear the lack of those things. He was born and grew up next to the greatest river in the then known world. Now he would be driven by fear of un-assuaged thirst. Having committed sin and crime, he would fear the wrath of a God whom he did not yet know well.

Our fears make us alert and aware and are a gift in that respect. They help us see what might hurt us. But when our fears become our focus, we lose sight of reality in our obsession over what could happen or might happen to us.

Moses was raised in the oral tradition of the Hebrews and the complex and ritualized religion of the Egyptians. He obviously held convictions strong enough to motivate him to kill. We think our beliefs make us what we are. “Seeing is believing” the saying goes, but we think “believing is seeing.” We have a hard time accepting evidence that contradicts our beliefs. What could the desert possibly teach a man of Moses’ erudition? His beliefs and prejudices would color his view and obscure the possibilities of new circumstances.

We think the people and things that hold our affections make our lives exciting and meaningful. Moses had lost family, friends, power, status and position. Attachment, like its first cousin, unforgiveness, keeps us looking back. Attachment stagnates us from the flow of grace. We think our salvation and happiness depend upon people and things. Fixation on who and what is finite and imperfect blinds us to the infinite and the holy. The stars are obscured by the artificial glow of streetlights. That’s why astronomical observatories looking into the heavens are built on desert mountaintops, away from the cities. It would take forty years of arid solitude before the false light of Moses’ fears, beliefs and attachments faded so that he could see the fire of God in an ordinary desert shrub.

I know men and women who seek to gain this vision by affinity with those who have received it by experience. They diligently read spiritual classics, go on retreats and fasts, learn new methods of prayer and seek guidance from  spiritual “giants.” I do the same, but find the vision is not for sale or barter. Looking for God through the thoughts of others is like reading about the sun in the light of a living room lamp. Without coming to the place where I had exhausted my emotional resources, physical strength, intellectual abilities, and spiritual understanding in pursuit of what I had no power to change or control, I would never have gained the insight that God must be enough for me or nothing else ever will be. It took the genuine light of God’s presence for me to obtain true vision. As David prayed to God, “For with you is the fountain of life; in your light we see light” (Ps 36:9).

What spiritual disciplines I have learned and practice are an effort to realize from my brokenness that the only righteousness and healing that I will ever know comes from Jesus Christ who has made me and bought me back with his blood from the debt and darkness of my own folly so that I may live in the provision and light of his love. In the words of Paul, “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained this or I have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own” (Phil 3:10-12).

Moses would have never chosen the 40 years in the desert. Neither would you or I. But without desolation; the stripping away of all that makes us comfortable and confident in ourselves; without the need born from the reality of human inadequacy instead of the conditioning of our felt need for immediate gratification; we would not turn aside to see and know Yahweh. This is the God who told Moses out of the burning bush that my name is “I am” (Ex 3:13-14) as in “I am who you need, and what you need and all that you will ever need.” Yaweh told Moses that “I am the God of your father (the source of your existence), the God of Abraham (who believed me, withheld nothing from me and trusted me to be righteous for him), the God of Isaac (who received the provision of grace and lived it), and the God of Jacob (who pursued his destiny by his own strength and cleverness until he wrestled with God and lost)” [Ex 3:6, with my own notes].

You who are in a desert right now. Have you considered that God has brought you to the place where you can see him and renew your relationship with him? ” ‘She forgot me,’says the Lord. Therefore, I am now going to allure her; I will lead her into the desert and speak tenderly to her” (Hos 2:13-14).

Next week, I will discuss why it is that God leads us to the desert to give us spiritual vision.

“O taste and see that the Lord is good. Happy are those who take refuge in him” (Ps 34:8).

Under the mercy of Christ,

Kent

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Kent Hansen is a Christian attorney, author and speaker. He practices corporate law and is the managing attorney of the firm of Clayson, Mann, Yaeger & Hansen in Corona, California. Kent also serves as the general counsel of Loma Linda University and Medical Center in Loma Linda, California.

Finding God’s grace revealed in the ordinary experiences of life, spiritual renewal in Christ and prayer are Kent’s passions. He has written two books,Grace at 30,000 Feet and Other Unexpected Places published by Review & Herald in 2002 and Cleansing Fire, Healing Streams: Experiencing God’s Love Through Prayer, published by Pacific Press in spring 2007. Many of his stories and essays about God’s encompassing love have been published in magazines and journals.Kent is often found on the hiking trails of the southern California mountains, following major league baseball, playing the piano or writing his weekly email devotional, “A Word of Grace for Your Monday” that is read by men and women from Alaska to Zimbabwe.

Kent and his beloved Patricia are enjoying their 31st year of marriage. They are the proud parents of Andrew, a college student.