Open Hands · Week 3 · Thursday · INSECURITY

They asked him to lead it. He said no inside four seconds, and the reason he gave out loud was a conflict in his diary, which was not true.

The real reason is eleven years old. He could recite it to you in order if you asked him, and he has recited it to himself more times than he would admit — what he was like then, the things he said to people who did not deserve them, the year that nobody in his family brings up at the table.

He has done the work since. Genuinely done it, over years, the slow unglamorous kind. Everyone around him can see it. He is the only person in that building still consulting the old file, and he consults it every time something is offered to him.

Moses Has a Record Too

There is a conversation at a burning bush that gets quoted for its beginning and not for its middle. The middle is an argument, and Moses is losing it badly, which is the encouraging part.

“Please, Lord,” Moses replied, “I have never been eloquent, neither in the past nor since You have spoken to Your servant, for I am slow of speech and tongue.”Exodus 4:10 (BSB)

Notice how he builds it. Neither in the past nor since You have spoken. He is citing history — a long consistent record of not being the man for this, and he is right about the record. He is also, elsewhere in his story, a man who killed someone and ran. The file is not thin.

God does not open the file.

And the LORD said to him, “Who gave man his mouth? Or who makes the mute or the deaf, the sighted or the blind? Is it not I, the LORD? Now go! I will help you as you speak, and I will teach you what to say.”Exodus 4:11–12 (BSB)

It is not a correction of the facts. God does not say the speech is better than Moses thinks, and He does not promise to fix it. He asks a question about who made it in the first place, and then He says go.

Insecurity recites your history. God speaks your identity. They are never discussing the same subject.

What It Cost

He went back on the Monday and said yes.

That is the whole event. There was no scene, no confession, no explanation of the four seconds the week before. He caught the person in a corridor and said he had got his dates wrong and would like to do it after all.

What it actually cost him is harder to see and larger than it looks. For eleven years he has had one sentence that keeps him out of rooms like that, and the sentence has been load-bearing. It has protected him from being found out, from being disappointing, from being visible in a way that invites someone to look up the record.

He starts in two weeks. He told me he has no idea what he will say if somebody who knew him then asks what he is doing now, and that he has decided to find out rather than arrange his life so that nobody ever asks.