“Moses agreed to stay with the man, and he gave his daughter Zipporah to Moses in marriage. She gave birth to a son whom he named Gershom, for he said, ‘I have been a resident alien in a foreign land.'” (CSB – Read the chapter)
Have you ever found yourself stuck somewhere you didn’t plan to be and didn’t necessarily want to be? For many of us, that can easily lead to a season of bitterness. We make do because we don’t have any other choice, but we’re not happy about it. And we make sure everyone knows we’re not happy about it too. But what if there’s another perspective on things? Sometimes seeing someone else’s story – like Moses’ here – can give us a glimpse through another lens that can be truly transformative if we’ll let it.
“When Pharaoh heard about this, he tried to kill Moses. But Moses fled from Pharaoh and went to live in the land of Midian, and sat down by a well. Now the priest of Midian had seven daughters. They came to draw water and filled the troughs to water their father’s flock. Then some shepherds arrived and drove them away, but Moses came to their rescue and watered their flock. When they returned to their father Reuel, he asked, ‘Why have you come back so quickly today?’ They answered, ‘An Egyptian rescued us from the shepherds. He even drew water for us and watered the flock.’ ‘So where is he?’ he asked his daughters? ‘Why then did you leave the man behind? Invite him to eat dinner.'” (CSB – Read the chapter)
When you hear something described as putrid, your first instinct is probably not going to be to go over and take a big whiff. Unless you are an adolescent boy, in which case, yes, that may very well be your first instinct. Putrid things don’t tend to smell very good. How ironic it is, then, that the word “potpourri,” which typically is used for a mixture of dried bits of flowers and other odds and ends that have been perfumed to provide a pleasing fragrance to a room is a transliteration of a French word that literally means, ‘the putrid pot.” When I tell you that today’s post is going to be a bit of a potpourri of things, though, I don’t have that in mind at all, and I promise it won’t smell. I’m thinking rather of potpourri in the Jeopardy sense of a mixture of all sorts of different things, a meaning which, interestingly, also comes from the same French word that originally referred to a Spanish stew that could include a whole fridge full of odds and ends. That’s a long introduction to tell you that today we are going to look at a number of different things in these verses that aren’t necessarily connected, but which are all interesting in their own right, and will help you get a better sense of what is happening here in a passage that usually gets overlooked on our way to the more exciting third chapter of Exodus. Let’s dive right in.
For the past two weeks, we have been talking about how to find peace in a world that is insane with sin. We’ve talked about the importance of reorienting our thinking on God through prayer and of engaging more intentionally and consistently with the Scriptures to give us the path we need to be following. In this last part, we are going to talk about one more essential thing that is all about putting these first two into practice. When we want to find a path through the messiness of the world around us, here’s what we should be doing.
Keep Calm and…Fulfill Your Ministry
As smart as the good folks in Hollywood are when it comes to producing entertainment, they really never know when a particular film is going to be a smashing success and when it will totally flop. For instance, there was a movie last year called Babylon that featured the A-list talent of Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie along with a budget of north of $100 million. It was perhaps the single biggest box office bomb of the last several years. A few years ago, though, Disney struck absolute gold with its smash hit, Frozen. A fun story combined with tremendous music made it the single most successful Disney animated film ever…right up until Frozen 2 came out, which beat it by almost $200 million. By most accounts and in spite of the box office numbers, Frozen 2 wasn’t ever quite as good as the original (sequels almost never are), but there was one song that really caught my attention.
The Nexus 