DTEB, “WHAT IS REALLY STRANGE”

Some of us at the meeting this morning decided to walk from the church to the restaurant where we have our after-meeting.  There had been a lot of rain, and as we were walking through a shopping center parking lot, we saw a strange sight.

“Look!” one of the guys exclaimed.  He was pointing at something in a very shallow puddle of water.  It was small, but was moving too fast for any of us to tell what it was.  I thought it might be a very small snake.  One of the other guys thought it was a tadpole.  (He was probably right.)

We stared at it for what seemed a long time, until somebody said, “That is really strange.”

However, one of the men in the group said, “No!  What is strange is four guys standing in a parking lot staring at a water puddle.”

The spell was broken, we laughed, and moved on.

Strange things abound in our world.  The really strange thing is when humans notice those strange things.

There was a man tending a flock of sheep in a fairly barren area.  Apparently, he was starved for entertainment, so he noticed things.  But things rarely got weird.  One day, they got very weird indeed.

He noticed a bush on fire.  No big deal.  He had seen that before.  But he stared a little longer and furrowed his brow.  Something was strange here: The bush was on fire, but it wasn’t burning up! He decided to go over for a closer look.

4  “When the LORD saw Moses coming to take a closer look, God called to him from the middle of the bush, ‘Moses! Moses!’ ‘Here I am!’ Moses replied.

5 ‘Do not come any closer,’ the LORD warned. ‘Take off your sandals, for you are standing on holy ground.’ (Exodus 3:4-5, New Living Translation)

Apparently, the LORD speaking to Moses was closely related to the fact that Moses turned aside to see the bush.  It wasn’t the burning bush itself that led to the call of Moses to lead the children of Israel out of Egypt.  It was Moses’ curiosity.  It would seem that God likes people to be curious, at least, under certain conditions.

Now, obviously, curiosity isn’t always a good thing.  It can, in fact, be fatal.  But the mere fact that something can be wrong does not mean that it is always a bad thing.  (Sex and lots of other things come to mind at this point.)  In fact the worst bad things are usually very good things, that have been terribly twisted.

Moses likely regretted his curiosity a thousand times.  Getting the children of Israel out of slavery was not a cake walk.  And once God had, through Moses, gotten the people out of Egypt, there was the matter of getting them into the Promised Land.  The fact of the matter is that the people he had helped bring out of Egypt nearly drove the poor man (and God) crazy. (Read Exodus through Deuteronomy for further details.)

Nevertheless, the truth is this: Whether the Israelites knew it or not, whether Moses liked it or not, it was Moses’ curiosity that ended up being transformative.

I don’t know if our curiosity this morning about some life form in a parking lot puddle will ever be as transformational as Moses’ curiosity before a burning bush in the desert.  However, I suspect that the ministry of curious noticing was good for us.  And perhaps the really strange thing is that we don’t notice more strange things.

Let’s notice a few strange things today and every day.  Who knows?   It might be the beginning of freedom for ourselves and others.  It might lead to a life-transforming encounter with God.