What Is That In Your Hand?

The LORD said to [Moses], “What is that in your hand?”

Exodus 4:2

Moses didn’t have much—a handful of sheep on the slopes of a blistered mountain. He also had eighty years of memories, some of them sad and regretful. He had some clothes, a family, a wise father-in-law, a tent in the desert. That’s about it.

Oh yes, he had a staff.

He’d probably found a branch broken from some sturdy tree, maybe six or seven feet long and reasonably straight. He’d seasoned and smoothed it to become his walking stick; plus, it was useful in herding sheep and warding off predators. But it was quite ordinary—just a rod.

On rugged Mount Horeb that day, as Moses argued with the Lord about his inadequacies for the mission being assigned him, God asked a simple question: “What is that in your hand?” It was a broken branch, a piece of dead wood, a rod. But the Lord wanted it, and the Lord touched it, and the Lord used it to baffle the magicians of Egypt, to turn the Nile to blood, to part the waters of the Red Sea, to create streams in the desert, and to deliver His people again and again.

What’s that in your hand?

Little is much if God is in it.

BARBARA FAIRCHILD