Timing is Everything

With the Chick going back to school this year, I plan to rejoin the Tuesday morning ladies class at church. So I purchased the study book they will be using -- a book called "Lady Bugs: The Journey Begins" by Denell Dennis. Bug stands for Better Understanding God. The first lesson, numero uno, hit me square in the gut.

She began with the story of Moses accepting God's call (Exodus 3). But she referenced a verse in Acts that I know I must have read more times than I could count. It says that after killing the Egyptian who was mistreating an Israelite in Moses' youth (40 can be called youth), he had believed the Israelites would know that God was going to use Moses to rescue them.

If you've been reading any of these entries in the last month or two, you know that I have been stuck on the whole talents/skills thing. Wondering if I am wasting my talents or if God has a job for me that I have missed. I think He got tired of hearing about it from me because here's an answer.

Moses obviously had the desire and skills to be the hero for the Israelites. I believe God had planted that in him and managed circumstances so that he would be uniquely qualified to act as their rescuer for Him. The problem was that he didn't wait on God's timing to act.

We're all human. That's common enough. Unfortunately, though, in a very human way, when things went sour for Moses in that first try, the lesson stuck. So in Exodus 3, when God calls him to be a hero for Him, Moses hems and haws and comes up with every excuse in the book. It occurs to me that the sting of that rejection might still be there behind the excuses.

Of course, I don't know. And by the time I'm able to ask Moses about it, I probably will no longer care. But I find myself wondering how often (and this was the lesson for me) the fear I have about stepping out and doing God's work comes from the sting of previous failures.

Failures from when I tried to use the talents and gifts He gave me but without waiting on His timing. Timing that is perfect because it comes from the perspective of the all-seeing, all-knowing Master and Creator of the universe. And NOT from a very small piece of a very small cog in a very small wheel who continually grasps at controlling her own universe.