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Minutes of Meetings with God |
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The Burning Bush ... |
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| A huge cloud of orange-brown dust surged around the corner of the house
and past the kitchen window. For a moment there was nothing to see but dust
and, I knew something dangerous was beginning to happen. An extremely strong
wind had kicked up very quickly and that wind played a lot of havoc in a
very short time.
Only moments before, my wife, Susie, and I were just wrapping up our evening meal. She had seen clouds were moving in and we would probably have some rain before too long. She had finished eating before I did. She went outside saying she wanted to try to get some odds and ends of work done in the serenity garden before the rain started. I was still at the kitchen table, finishing my food, when the dust cloud swept through. My first thought was... Oh, God! Susie is outside in this! I went out to try to find her and hustle her inside where it would be safer. I went out the back door of the breezeway. I couldn't see her anywhere. There was no sign of her at all. Usually she leaves the side door open on the barn when she goes to get her gardening tools, but the door was shut. I yelled. However, the wild sounds of the wind drowned out my voice. I went to the front of the house. Still no sign of Susie. The wind continued to blast away. That was when the high tension electrical wires (40,000 volts each) behind the house started to go, falling to the ground with huge flashes of light, fire balls, and horrible noise. Once more, I went to the back of the house. This time I saw Susie coming toward the house from the East end of the serenity garden. I motioned frantically for her to get herself to the house. She threaded her way between the buildings, bushes and downed power lines to where I stood on the patio. She was safe!!! After a quick hug, we went in the house and watched the rest of what I began to call, "our 20 minute hurricane." The rain fell, the wind continued to blow, the lightning flashed, the thunder rolled. Our lights flickered a time or two, but, miraculously, our power stayed on. Almost as quickly as it had started, the storm was over. We cautiously went outside to see what damage was done. One large tree on the West end of the property had a big branch broken off. We'd have to get someone with a good sized chain saw to cut it up for us. Most of what happened would have to wait for someone from Edison to fix. Two of the high tension power lines had broken and were draped all the way across the property from U.S. 23 to East Lloyd Road. One of the wires was across East Lloyd and that road would be closed for about 4 days until an Edison crew cleared the wire. Our neighbors across the road and to the East of us were all without electricity, but even with all the power line damage in our yard, our lights and everything still worked. Dundee volunteer firemen came to the house to give us official notice there were power lines down in our yard and to warn us to stay away from them. Later, an Edison public safety person came and draped bright yellow warning tape across the yard where ever the lines were down. Our place looked like some kind of bizarre crime scene, yellow tape everywhere, hundreds of yards of the stuff. The power lines sizzled and smoked in the dampness for days. The lines not only lay on the ground (at one point only about 20-25 feet from our LP gas tank), but on the huge evergreen just behind the house, and on several of our apple trees to the East of the house. We later found out the power lines had some 40,000 volts of electricity still passing through them (an Edison crew finally came moments before Susie left for the Church picnic on the following Sunday, just long enough to disconnect the lines so they are less a threat). The heat from the lines burned the grass and cut a 2 or so inch scar into the ground where they lay. One of the apple trees was cut down as, over several days, a power line ate its way through the trunk. The wire caused the apple tree to smolder and occasionally burst into a small flame. One of Edison's public safety people (a poor soul who had to stay awake all night to keep people away from the power line across Lloyd Road) called the apple tree "a sparkler." After a while, I started to kid around saying, "Moses had a burning bush, Susie and I have a smoldering apple tree!" Yes, Moses had a burning bush! Once I started, it became difficult for me to stop thinking about that burning bush and its meanings. Foremost, my thoughts turned to how adversity pushes us, even the most unlikely of us, into looking for God somewhere in our lives. Moses was a person on the run. He had killed someone. He went from a position of prestige and power at the center of a thriving civilization to being a poor and lowly and lonely shepherd in the depths of the desert. Moses, by most standards, was a failure. He had nothing but good intentions in what he had done. But Moses did the wrong thing, at the wrong time, in the wrong place, and there was no hiding his crime. He had stumbled, fallen, and hurt himself in the worst possible ways, not so much physically hurt himself, but spiritually and emotionally hurt himself. Moses, when he came across that burning bush, was one destitute human being. Moses, the most unlikely person, met God in the most unlikely place, and in the most unlikely form... a burning bush that flames did not devour. That flame, which was somehow the presence of God, did not appear in some king's or emperor's palace. That flame, did not appear before someone of great economic or political power, to someone of might or majesty, to someone who commanded thousands or millions of people. The flame appeared to someone who was alone, poor, powerless, confused, rejected and dejected... out in the desert. Moses life was changed by that meeting. The changes were not easy; many of them Moses did not want and actively resisted. But once God began to work in Moses, there was no stopping the hand of the Creator. That hand shaped and molded Moses, according to a divine plan, into a great leader of God's people. Moses, the one time criminal and destitute fugitive, became the one who led the Children of Israel from their slavery in Egypt to the freedom of the Promised Land. A smoldering apple tree really isn't much like Moses' burning bush except as a reminder. In the adversity of life, whether great or small, God is somehow present. Too often we blame God for the difficult and trying circumstances in which we find ourselves or those we care about. We mistake God's presence in those difficult situations as a kind of malicious cause. We see God as some sort of cosmic terrorist out to get us. However, God is not present to punish us, to crush us, to torture us, to bait us or to humiliate us. Sadly, we already do too good a job of that on ourselves and on each other. Neither is God apathetic and distant. No, God is present to redeem us, to save us from ourselves, from each other, from the powers of evil. "For God so loved the world ..." |