Defining Moments (3)
Then Moses said to God, “Behold, I am going to the sons of Israel, and I will say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you.’ Now they may say to me, ‘What is His name?’ What shall I say to them?” Exodus 3:13 NASB
To you – When Moses arrived, Israel experienced a defining moment. The elders could have rejected Moses’ announcement. And after the first round with Pharoah, they seem to be quite ready to do just that. The elders could have said to themselves, “So, who is this man anyway? He’s been in hiding for forty years. He has a rather dubious past. How can we trust him?” But they didn’t. They decided to take his advice. Perhaps they thought, “Well, it can’t get worse. What’s the harm?” Of course, it did get worse—before it got better. Maybe that’s the point of a defining moment. It’s a crisis of faith, so to speak; a point where things could get worse before they get better. How much worse isn’t revealed. How long it can get worse isn’t revealed either. But the very fact that this moment sets the stage for worse or better is crucial. Someone once wrote, “Hope is the child of loss, not the cousin of expectation” (oh, that was me).
I was divorced when my two boys were four and six. Trying to survive financially, I accepted a job in New Jersey. My boys were in Oregon. That meant being thousands of miles from them, a decision that altered the course of all our lives and continues to affect us to this day. The defining moment came at the airport just before boarding the plane. I was shattered. Weeping. Unable to talk. Gripping those little bodies like they would evaporate if I let go. Unable to explain the impending separation, the broken soul within me. Seeing their eyes—confused, anxious, distraught—hearts torn apart without understanding why. And mine too. How could I let them go? How could I survive without them? The emotional suicide of economics. Could I really keep living in a one room (literally), third floor walk-up hole in the center of the city? Could I turn down a better job that would at least let me pay for myself and child support? All those perilous decisions that didn’t manifest themselves for decades. At that moment, I was literally at the edge, completely broken, just going through the motions. My brother was there. He gave me a card, a Tolkien image with the words “The road goes ever on.” Even now as I remember, the tears are coming again. I have buried this wound so deeply that its existence is nothing but an unconscious nightmare. For the first thousand miles in the air, I wept. I’m pretty sure I have never recovered. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons I find flying comfortable. I escape myself at 35,000 feet.
Notice how Moses frames his anticipated question. He doesn’t say, “The God of your fathers has sent me.” He says, The God of your fathers has sent me to you.” This is personal. This isn’t preaching to the choir, declarations from Zion, announcements from Mars hill. This is exchange in your presence. It is the overture of someone who is risking rejection. What happens next isn’t scripted. How you respond, if you respond, will make all the difference. That fact of communication applies to the divine. How you respond, if you respond . . . the risk of involvement. As it turned out, God and Moses were successful. The people left Egypt. But it wasn’t predestined. Getting on that airplane may have seemed like the only choice, but it wasn’t. I choose not to suffer financial hardship. My children suffered emotional trauma. I passed the cost to them. It was very personal. Perhaps all I knew was the wound of my own childhood, and not knowing how to deal with abandonment left me with a legacy that I foisted on them. Just like Moses, I was unable to effectively deal with my past. Therefore, it became my children’s future.
God help me.
Topical Index: abandonment, wound, personal, Exodus 3:13
