“Dear Walt” was not premeditated!
Quite the contrary … after an extraordinary Sunday morning portrayal of Moses’ exile to Midian, unrelenting words invaded my thoughts, demanding to be heard, until I set them down on paper. Even so, I still cannot explain the insistence of those beginning words that I write them in a letter to someone named “Walt” that very Sunday afternoon.
There is no one person named Walt in my conscious memory of any particular consequence, and therein may lie the attraction of the name … that “Walt” is not associated with a specific person, but instead represents a composite of lives that have consistently steered me in this particular direction, even during the times I was in my own Midian desert.
I did not set out to write a novel. In fact, as I wrote the first few pages, I was hoping I could develop it into my first real short story. But as the characters took on their respective lives and relationships, they required the same thorough development and inclusion as the text of the Dear Walt letter that very first Sunday. The plot took shape and extended through its own energy, due in part to Pastor Dan’s continuing multi-Sunday treatise on the early days of Moses.
I simply could not dismiss the compelling parallels of Moses’ flight from Egypt because it was “a place he could no longer live” in his self-imposed exile, to Andy’s bus journey to Denver and his first days in Platteville. For Moses, Midian offered refuge from the immediate storms of life, as Platteville had for Andy. But over time, Midian was also the place where God prepared Moses for his eventual calling by transforming him into a shepherd, the same occupation which Jesus himself claims in the New Testament. Unwittingly, Andy was trained, much like a shepherd, to deal with difficult situations in other people’s lives as well, all the while kicking and screaming against God, and repeatedly dismissing the call to earnest prayer in the burning bush dreams.
In today’s society many of us have taken similar journeys away from “places where we can no longer live.” I know I have. My journey lasted three and a half decades. Sometimes our journeys are initiated by difficult family circumstances, or an overwhelming urge to express newfound independence as we grow into adulthood. In other cases we may feel hurt or slighted by a church or other untenable religious connection and rebel, as surely as Andy did, against God himself because of it. But if we are truly called by God, he will eventually find us in our everyday circumstance and confront us with our own burning bush experience, often in the middle of life threatening circumstance or our own self-constructed mess. The challenge is to understand in our own burning bush moment that we are standing on holy ground and have no choice but to acknowledge that we were never really in charge of our lives in the first place. The comfort in that moment comes only when we surrender control to Him and realize that with God there are no limits on healing.
Instead of turning away from the burning bush, perhaps we should seek it out.
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