Dishes, Names, and Burning Bushes

As I was standing in front of a mountain of dishes tonight, the kitchen lit by a dim florescent bulb, I realized that I had been letting my blog become sadly neglected.  I think that my dog did too, based on the dejected way that she was looking up at me from her bed next to the sink, but then again, that could be because she has a love for maple syrup and eggs.  She has the best I'm-starving-pitiful looks.  And I usually fall for them.

But back to the subject, as I stood there listening to Cat Steven's Greatest Hits and sinking my hands into the dirty dishwater, I wondered what I should write for my next blog post.  At one time (actually, not too long ago), I had it all figured out—I actually came up with ideas of what to write about, and then I sat down and wrote them, but that hasn't been happening lately.  So while I brainstormed, I came across a totally unrelated thought: people seem to get my name wrong when I call them on the phone or introduce myself for the first time.  Grace doesn’t seem that hard to pronounce to me, but I've been called everything from Stacy to Trace—I must have bad pronunciation.  Then I wondered if I could use that in a blog post, you know, stem off of the "getting my name wrong" thing and do something cool with it.  I started thinking of passages in the Bible that might somewhat sort of correspond with that topic.  Can you come up with any?  Most likely not... but I remembered a passage that definitely had to do with names: Moses being called by God.
In Exodus 3-4, God (in the form of a burning bush) and Moses have a very serious conversation.  God's obviously chosen Moses to do His work here on earth, to take the people of Israel out of the land of the Egyptians and to the Promised Land, but Moses isn't so sure.  After a number of questions and excuses—Moses goes from wondering out loud if the people will even believe him to how horrible of a speaker he was—Moses finally asks the One Question that he had been dying to ask.  I can imagine how his knees were knocking as he asked it:

"But Moses said, 'Pardon your servant, Lord.  Please send someone else.'" (Exodus 4:13)

God was angry.  In fact, the passage states that his "anger burned against Moses."  Now I don't know about you, but I don't want the anger of the Lord of everything burning against me.  Moses was probably scared to death and didn't know what to do next.  He was upset, because the Lord had found the "wrong person" for the job.  Not that the Lord ever makes mistakes, Moses most likely reasoned that He just confused the name "Moses" with someone else's, someone braver, better, a public speaker and rabble-rouser.  But no. 
God had chosen Moses for a Big Purpose—to show that the smallest, most incompetent among us can become great and accomplish his dreams.  Although I don't know if Moses' dream at that time was leading thousands of people out of a city and into the desert with a king and his army trailing behind.  But one day, God knew that Moses would come to love the people that he lived for.  And the Lord wasn't about to let Moses miss that opportunity to love them.

Even though that's completely off-topic from people getting my name wrong, I think it's an important lesson to learn—God gives us seemingly impossible, unfathomable, crazy, unacceptable, strange tasks because He wants the best for us.  So the next time you meet up with a burning bush... but seriously.  When He calls, listen.  Don't assume that He's mixed up His names.