What Is That in Your Hand?

The king of Egypt was dead, and the people he had worked to the bone were crying out.

God heard their groaning, and He remembered His covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God saw the Israelites and took notice. Heard, remembered, saw, noticed. Four verbs, one after another, all of them pointed at Egypt.

The next sentence starts a new chapter, and it starts with a word that's easy to skip.

Meanwhile, Moses was shepherding the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian.

Meanwhile. While heaven was taking notice, the man it was about to send was out past the edge of the map with somebody else's sheep.

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He hadn't always been a shepherd. He'd been raised in Pharaoh's house, and the last time anyone in Egypt saw him, he was running for the border with a dead man buried in the sand behind him.

The first thing he did in Midian was sit down beside a well. Seven sisters came to water their father's flock, some shepherds drove them off, and Moses got up and drove off the shepherds and watered the flock himself. When the sisters got home early, their father asked why. An Egyptian rescued us from the shepherds, they said. He even drew water for us and watered the flock.

That was who he was to them. An Egyptian. A stranger who happened to be handy at a trough.

He married one of the sisters and stayed. The text says after a long time, and the count elsewhere makes it about forty years. Long enough for a palace education to stop mattering to anyone. Long enough to learn where grass grew in a dry country and where water could be found. The flock still wasn't his. He was working for his wife's father, in his middle years, out of sight of everything he'd been trained for.

On the day this story starts, he led the flock to the far side of the wilderness. A man doesn't take sheep to the far side unless he knows the way back.

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Then the bush that burned and didn't burn up. Moses could have kept walking. He didn't. I must go over and see this marvelous sight, he thought, and the text says God called his name only after he turned aside to look.

What followed was an argument, and Moses made most of it.

God said he had seen the misery in Egypt and was sending Moses to Pharaoh. Moses said, Who am I, that I should go? God promised to go with him. Moses asked what name to give when the people asked who sent him, and got the answer I AM WHO I AM. Then he raised the objection he'd been working toward. What if they do not believe me or listen to my voice?

He was asking about his credibility. Forty years gone, a killing on his record, a stranger now to the people he was supposed to lead. Who would listen to him?

His first objection had been about himself, and God never answered it with a list of qualifications. Who am I? got no résumé back. It got company: I will surely be with you. Nothing in that answer depended on who Moses had been in Egypt, or on who he'd become in Midian. Now the objection had moved outward, to how other people would see him, and that's the moment the conversation turned to his hand.

God didn't argue the point. He asked a question.

What is that in your hand?

A staff, he replied.

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It's worth noticing what God didn't ask. He didn't ask what Moses had learned in the palace, or what he used to be called, or whether he could still speak the language of the court. Moses would bring up his mouth a few minutes later, I am slow of speech and tongue, and that got its own answer. This question wasn't about his mouth. It was about the thing he was already holding.

A staff is a shepherd's tool. It's what you lean on across rough ground and what you use to turn a stray back toward the flock. It was the most ordinary object in the scene, and it came from the years nobody would have listed as preparation.

God told him to throw it down. It became a snake, and Moses ran from it. Then God told him to reach out and grab it by the tail, and it turned back into a staff in his hand. Whatever happened to it, it ended up back where it started. In his hand.

The argument went on. Moses said please, Lord, send someone else, and the anger of the Lord burned against him, and God gave him his brother Aaron to speak for him. That's usually where people stop reading. But the last sentence God says in the whole conversation isn't about Aaron, or Pharaoh, or the people. It's about the stick.

But take this staff in your hand so you can perform signs with it.

After all the signs and objections and the brother sent to do the talking, God's last instruction was: don't leave that behind.

So he went home and asked his father-in-law's leave, and he heard one more thing before he set out. Go back to Egypt, for all the men who sought to kill you are dead. The forty years hadn't only trained him. They had outlasted the people who wanted him dead.

Then comes the line that's easiest of all to read past. So Moses took his wife and sons, put them on a donkey, and headed back to Egypt. And he took the staff of God in his hand.

The staff of God. At the bush it had been a staff, a shepherd's stick. Nobody carved anything new. It was the same piece of wood. What changed was whose work it was going to do.

He stood in front of Pharaoh at the end of it. Moses was eighty years old and Aaron was eighty-three when they spoke to Pharaoh.

The forty years he might have called wasted were the place the thing in his hand came from. He didn't have to go get something new. He had to look down.

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Where this meets your week

The years that don't make the story. Every life has a meanwhile. The decade in the job taken to pay the bills. The long middle of a business that never grew. The years spent driving a parent to appointments. When people tell their story, those years get one sentence or none. Moses' got one word. But the far side of the wilderness was where he learned the ground. This week, tell one person about one thing you learned in a stretch you usually skip. Make it specific. Not "patience," but "how to get a straight answer out of a hospital billing office," or "how to keep a crew working the week payroll was late." Bring it up the way any story comes up over coffee: "I don't talk about those years much, but here's something I learned in them." People often lean in at exactly the part that seemed dull.

"So what do you do now?" It gets asked at weddings and reunions and in the church parking lot, and it can land like an accusation when the title is gone. Moses was asked what was in his hand, and he answered with one plain word. Next time it comes, skip the old title. Write the answer ahead of time so it's ready. A few that work: "I'm helping a neighbor get a small business off the ground." "I fix things for people who can't afford a repairman." "I'm learning to cook for two again." It doesn't have to impress anyone. It has to be true and in the present tense. If nothing true is ready yet, "I'm figuring that out" is honest, and it beats a title from the past.

The thing that looks dangerous on the ground. Some people put down the old work and then can't bring themselves to touch it. It feels outdated, or tied to how things ended, or a little frightening to try again in front of anyone. Moses ran from his staff the moment it hit the ground, and then he reached back and picked it up by the tail. Pick one old skill back up this month, once, for somebody who needs it. Make the offer small and specific, so it's easy to say yes to: "I did payroll for forty people for years. If you ever want someone to look over how you're handling yours, I'd be glad to spend an hour." One hour, one person, one task. If it feels rusty, that's fine. Nobody grabs a snake by the tail gracefully.

"Nobody wants what I know." It may be true of the title, the system, the trade jargon, the way things were done in that building. To the women at the well, Moses was just an Egyptian who watered their sheep, and the palace meant nothing to anybody in Midian. The shepherd's stick turned out to be what mattered. Ask one younger person what they're stuck on this week. The wording matters. "Can I give you some advice?" usually closes the door. "What's the hardest part of your work right now?" opens it. Then listen at least twice as long as you talk. If something you know fits, offer it as a story rather than a rule: "I ran into something like that once. Here's what happened." If nothing fits, the listening still counted.

At the kitchen table. A spouse, an old friend or a grown child often sees what's in someone's hand more clearly than the one holding it. Ask them straight out. Pour two cups of coffee and say, "I'm trying to figure out what I'm actually good at now that the job's gone. What do you see me do well?" Write down what they say without correcting it. A small group can do the same around a table: each person takes a turn, and the others each name one thing they've watched that person do well. Nobody gets to argue with their own list.

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Turn the paper over.

Most people who've lost a role have already written the first side, in their heads, many times: what's gone, what's out of date, what nobody needs. This time write the other side.

What you know how to do. Not the title. The work underneath it.

Who trusts you. Even one name.

What you know now that you'd have paid real money to know at thirty-five.

Give it an hour this week, at a table, with a pen. Morning usually works better than night, when the first side of the paper is loudest. Take about twenty minutes for each question and keep writing until the time is up, even when the entries look small. "I can back a trailer into a tight spot." "My grandkids call me when their car makes a noise." "I know how to let someone go without humiliating them." Those count.

Write it down without arguing with it. It will probably look like a stick. Look at it anyway.

When the page stays blank, or the old side keeps crowding in, stop and hand the pen to someone else. Ask the person who knows you best to write the first three entries. Then add a fourth yourself, and keep the page where you'll see it again in a month.

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He left Midian the way he'd lived there, with a stick in his hand. And he took the staff of God in his hand.

Nobody had made him a new one.