Moses says he can’t do it.
He doesn’t know what to say, he’s not a good speaker, he’s tried this before and it didn’t work. He lists reason after reason, and underneath all of it, the thing that is at the core of his fear — the one he finally admits when he runs out of excuses — please, just send someone, anyone, else.
God says no. He doesn’t reject the excuses without a reason, he listens and responds to what Moses is saying. But He says no, to Moses’s final request. His no is one that comes with Grace — he says to Moses that Aaron will go with him.
The problem isn’t Moses’ capability. It never was. The problem is that Moses has already decided the work belongs to someone more qualified, and he is simply trying to get God to agree with him.
I find myself echoing Moses’s life more than I want to admit.
Not with burning bushes — I’ve never been near one of those in the way that Moses was, but I know the feeling of seeing something that needs doing, something I’m standing close enough to do, and quietly hoping someone else notices it first.
The person with a broken down car on the shoulder, hazards flashing.
The conversation that needs to happen and keeps not happening.
The thing that sits in the back of my mind as mine to do and stays there, undone, because it makes me uncomfortable.
What I tell myself is that I’m not the right person. What I’m actually doing is outsourcing the obedience and calling it humility.
James spells out that this isn’t something that is okay in the believer. He makes it almost mathematical: if someone is cold and hungry and you tell them to stay warm and eat well and walk away, your words have done exactly, precisely, nothing.
Faith that produces no action is not a diminished Faith. It’s not a small Faith, it’s not a different Faith, it’s not a ‘that’s not my spiritual gift’ Faith.
It’s a dead one.
James means precisely what he says, and chose that word knowing we’d flinch at it.
Scripture is filled with places where God is called a Living God, and a Living God cannot have dead subjects.
James is the softer way of saying that. Jesus says it much more severely.
He says to give to the one who asks, and not to turn away from the one who wants to borrow.
No qualifiers.
Nothing about whether the ask is reasonable, whether the person will use it well, whether you’ve already given enough this month.
It sits between the teaching about going the extra mile and the instruction to love your enemies. Jesus is putting it between people you think it’s okay to hate, and crushing that idea with this phrase to give to anyone who asks of you.
Jesus sees all of it as part of the same posture — a life oriented outward, toward others, rather than inward, toward self-protection.
The easy exit is to call it metaphor. But that’s not what the rest of the section reads as, and to say it’s not literal, or not for me, is to be Moses at the burning bush, begging God to choose someone else.
There is no Someone Else. There never was.
I’ve been wanting and waiting for a more capable person, a more convenient moment, a clearer calling — and that wait is itself a choice.
It’s the choice to let my faith stay theoretical, to affirm the right things and defer the right actions, to live in the gap between what I believe and what I do and call that gap “not yet” or “not me”.
God’s answer to Moses wasn’t that Moses was wrong to feel inadequate. His answer was that adequacy isn’t the requirement. Availability is.
Jesus doesn’t say the Spirit will speak through the eloquent, or articulate.
He says the Spirit will speak through you when the moment comes — that at the point of need, the words are provided.
The supply is not the problem. The showing up is.
I keep finding that the work that I most want to hand off is exactly the work I was standing closest to.
Someone Else is never coming — and that the asking of me, in that moment, is not an accident.