Sunday Sentiments: Listening in Midian

 

Ryan and I are co-leading our Sunday School class today – an opportunity that came to us a bit late in the week, so we scrambled to find a topic. I’ve been camping in Exodus lately, and I’ve been reviewing some of the lessons I learned to use in my upcoming women’s retreat, so I naturally gravitated to those chapters for some class discussion for today.

            Yesterday, as we worked to unpack a few more boxes in our office, I cataloged and shelved some books that had been sitting in a pile for far too long. One of them is a great book I read months ago, called Letting God Be Enough. It’s written by my friend and favorite Bible study writer, Erica Wiggenhorn.

            One of the chapters – the one we’re using for class today – talks about the years Moses lived in Midian. Erica talked about how God used that time to prepare Moses for the massive upcoming assignment, but she also wrote this sentence, which I had underlined for very good reason: Midian is the place where we learn to listen.

            I learned, as I studied in Exodus that Midian was a place of a (perceived, anyway) fresh start for Moses, and it was also a place of comfort for him. He was content there.

            But it wasn’t as much of a season of down-time as he thought it would be. It was the place where, in the quiet, God worked in his heart, even if he didn’t realize that’s what was happening. It was a place of listening.

            Does your life feel like a Midian right now? Maybe it’s kind of comfortable. Maybe it’s a fresh start. Maybe it’s mostly good – but not all it could be. Maybe you know, somewhere deep in your soul, that God has more for you, but you don’t know exactly what it might be.

            Can I encourage you to listen? You have no idea what God might have to say to you if you just…listen.

            I know I need to do some listening of my own.