What Is That in Your Hand

The shepherd at the bush had already made one excuse, and he was on his second.

They won’t believe me, he said. They won’t listen to me. They’ll say the Lord never appeared to me.

He had his reasons. He’d been gone forty years. The last time his own people saw him, he was a palace-raised Egyptian with blood on his hands, running for the border. Now he was keeping his father-in-law’s flock on the far side of the desert, standing on ground he’d just been told was holy, in front of a bush that burned and didn’t burn up, being told to go back.

God didn’t argue with him. He asked a question.

What is that in your hand?

Moses looked down. A staff.

Nearly every life has a stretch it leaves out when it tells its own story. Years that don’t go on a résumé, or went to something nobody would call a career. The thing Moses was holding came from exactly that stretch.

Start with the version of him everybody remembers. Basket in the river. Pharaoh’s daughter. Raised in the palace, educated as an Egyptian prince, the whole apparatus of the most powerful empire on earth within reach.

Then the part in between.

He was forty when he made his first move, and it was a killing. He went out to see his own people at their labor, saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, looked this way and that, the text says, and struck the Egyptian dead and hid the body in the sand. The next day he tried to break up a fight between two Hebrews, and one of them said: Who made you a prince and a judge over us? Do you mean to kill me the way you killed the Egyptian?

That was the end of his career. Pharaoh heard. Moses ran. He crossed into the desert of Midian with nothing, sat down by a well, and married into a family of shepherds.

Then nothing, for forty years.

Stephen, in the book of Acts, lays Moses’ life out in three blocks: forty years in Egypt, forty in Midian, forty in the wilderness. The middle block is almost blank in the text. He tended sheep. He had two sons. He named the first Gershom, which sounds like a stranger there, because he said, I have been a sojourner in a foreign land. He named the second Eliezer, because the God of his father had been his help and saved him from Pharaoh’s sword. That’s the recorded inner life of the man for four decades. Two boys’ names and the sentences that explain them.

A prince, trained to rule, spent forty years walking sheep around the back side of a desert.

Back at the bush, God told him to throw the staff on the ground. It became a serpent, and Moses ran from it. Then God told him to reach out and take it by the tail, and it was a staff again in his hand.

A shepherd’s stick. The tool of the job that didn’t count. That staff went to Egypt. It was stretched out over the sea. It struck the rock at Horeb when the people had no water. The instrument of the whole deliverance was the one thing he’d picked up in the years he would have left off the résumé.

He wasn’t done objecting. I am slow of speech and of tongue. God’s answer was close to sharp: Who has made man’s mouth? Is it not I, the Lord? And when Moses finally said the thing he’d meant all along, please send someone else, the text says the anger of the Lord was kindled against him. God gave him his brother Aaron to do the talking, and sent him anyway.

He went. With a stick, a slow tongue, and a forty-year gap, back to the country he’d fled as a killer.

Look at what the job turned out to be. Not the plagues; God did those. The job was leading a great crowd of frightened, complaining, disorganized people through a desert for forty years. Finding water. Finding food. Settling disputes. Enduring people who blamed him for everything and wanted to go back to Egypt every time it got hard. Knowing the ground, where the wells were, how to keep a flock together when it wanted to scatter.

He had done that job, with sheep, in that same desert, for forty years.

The book doesn’t let him finish clean.

Near the end of the wilderness years, at a place called Meribah, the people were out of water and complaining again, and God told Moses to speak to a rock and water would come. The same chapter opens with his sister’s death. Moses stood in front of the people and said, Hear now, you rebels: shall we bring water for you out of this rock? And he struck it with his staff. Twice.

Water came. And God said: because you did not believe me, to uphold me as holy in the eyes of the people, you shall not bring this assembly into the land I have given them.

Forty years walking toward one place, and one bad afternoon took it. He begged, later. Deuteronomy records it: Please let me go over and see the good land. The answer was: Enough from you. Do not speak to me of this matter again.

So he climbed a mountain called Nebo, and God showed him the whole land from where he stood. He died there, at a hundred and twenty, and God buried him, and the text says nobody knows where the grave is to this day.

He saw it. He didn’t enter it. And the last word on him, in the same chapter, is that there has not arisen a prophet since in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face.

The man who lost his temper at the rock is the one the book says God knew face to face. The book holds both.

The palace didn’t train him for the wilderness. The wilderness did. The prince had already tried once, at forty, with a killing and a look both ways, and it failed in a day. The shepherd lasted forty years. God sent the shepherd, not the prince.

The years that looked wasted were the training.

Where this meets your week

Here’s how it reads for a life with a gap in the middle and a stick in its hand.

“None of it transfers.” You left the role, or sold the company, or closed the shop, and you’ve quietly decided that what you did there counts nowhere else. Moses kept sheep together in a desert for forty years and then kept people together in the same desert for forty more. Write down what the old work actually required of you, not the title. Reading a room. Letting someone go gently. Finding money that wasn’t there. Keeping a crew together when it wanted to scatter. That’s the list of what’s in your hand, and every family and neighborhood you’ll ever be part of is short of it.

The caregiving years, now over. If you spent years taking care of a parent or a spouse and that season has ended, it can feel like you were off the field the whole time. You were on a different field, the way Midian was. You learned to be present without fixing, to manage a dozen professionals who don’t talk to each other, to grieve in installments. Somewhere near you, someone is just starting that stretch. Find one and tell them what you know.

Letting Aaron talk. If you spent years at the front, preaching, teaching, leading the meeting, the front may belong to somebody else now. Moses got a brother to do the speaking, and it was God’s idea, not a demotion. When a younger person can say it better than you can now, hand them the words and stand behind them. The staff stays in your hand. The mouth can be theirs.

The temper that shows up late. Moses struck the rock near the end, worn out, in the chapter that opens with his sister’s death, and it cost him the one thing he’d walked toward for forty years. If you’ve noticed you’re shorter with the people closest to you, sharper with strangers, angrier than you used to be, it’s worth asking what grief is underneath it. Name the grief out loud to one person. Put the staff down before you swing it at somebody who’s only asking for water.

The question at the bush still does the work, and it takes a pen and an honest hour.

Inventory the wilderness. Take the years you skip when you tell your story and write down what you learned in them. Not what you accomplished. What you learned. How to sit with somebody who’s dying. How to run a household on nothing. How to keep going when nobody’s watching and nobody’s going to say thanks. How to read a person who’s about to quit. How to wait.

Then look at what’s in your hand. The thing you got good at while you thought you were off the field. It probably isn’t impressive. It’s probably a stick. It was for him, too.

Pick it up.