I woke up this morning, glanced at the news, and for a brief moment wondered whether the earth had slipped off its axis while I was asleep. Yesterday’s headline in the Courant read, “The World Is on Watch,” and it carried that familiar sense of urgency we have all come to recognize—the suggestion that something enormous had either just happened or was about to happen at any moment.
But of course, nothing of that magnitude had occurred. The earth was still in its orbit. Gravity was still doing its work. The world had not ended. We are still here.
That small moment of dissonance says something important about the time we are living in. We inhabit a world in which the news cycle is not only perpetually dramatic but constantly accelerating. Each day brings a new crisis, a new outrage, a new looming catastrophe. And just as quickly as one set of histrionics captures our attention, it is displaced by the next. The language of emergency has become ordinary, and the extraordinary has become routine.
And then, somewhere between the headlines and the coffee cooling on the counter, life resumes. We go to work. We tend to responsibilities. We do what we did yesterday and expect to do again tomorrow.
We are now about a week into the civil New Year. This is no longer the moment of countdowns and resolutions, but the quieter, more honest moment that follows. The calendar has turned, but most of life has not. Bills still arrive. Obligations still press in. Time still demands more than it seems willing to give. And it is precisely here—after the noise fades—that a familiar question can begin to surface: If this is what the year will look like, how are we to live faithfully within it?
Scripture takes that question seriously. And few figures embody it more clearly than Moses, particularly Moses at the edge of eighty years old.
Rabbinic tradition is attentive to Moses’ age in a way we often overlook. Shemot Rabbah notes that Moses’ life unfolds in three distinct forty-year periods: forty years in Pharaoh’s household, forty years in Midian, and forty years leading Israel (Shemot Rabbah 1:1). What is striking is that two-thirds of Moses’ life pass before he does the work for which he is remembered. At nearly eighty years old, Moses is not a young man preparing for destiny. He is an aging shepherd, living far from power, influence, and expectation.
There was a time when Moses appeared to be a contender. Raised in Pharaoh’s house, educated, capable, and aware—at least dimly—of his Hebrew identity, he likely believed that history would bend around him. But that sense of purpose collapsed quickly. A single act of violence, followed by fear and flight, and Moses disappears into obscurity. By the time we meet him again, he is working for his father-in-law, tending sheep in a harsh landscape, with little prospect of advancement and no obvious trajectory forward.
Rabbinic literature does not romanticize this period. Shepherding was considered lowly, isolating work. In fact, some midrashim note that Moses’ training as a shepherd was not incidental, but essential. Shemot Rabbah imagines Moses chasing after a stray lamb, only to discover it had run because it was thirsty. When Moses gently carries the lamb back, God says, in effect, “You have compassion for sheep; you are fit to shepherd My people” (Shemot Rabbah 2:2). Leadership, in other words, is learned not through prominence, but through patience.
And yet, from the inside, this season must have felt like a holding pattern. Moses’ days are repetitive. His work is quiet. His surroundings are familiar to the point of monotony. If there is a divine plan unfolding, it is deeply hidden.
Then comes the bush.
The Torah tells us that Moses encounters a bush that burns without being consumed. Rabbinic tradition presses into the detail. In Shemot Rabbah, the sages ask why God chose to appear in a thornbush rather than a mighty cedar or a towering mountain. Their answer is simple and profound: to teach that there is no place devoid of the Divine Presence—not even a thornbush (Shemot Rabbah 2:5). Not the wilderness. Not obscurity. Not the long middle of a life that feels stalled.
What is easy to miss is that this bush is not in a new place. Moses has walked this terrain countless times. Nothing about the location is extraordinary. The difference is not the bush; it is Moses’ attention. The Torah tells us that Moses says, “I must turn aside and see.” Only then does God speak.
Holiness does not announce itself with headlines. It waits to be noticed.
When we turn to the Gospels, we find that the story of Yeshua is told in ways that deliberately echo the life of Moses. Threatened infancy, hidden beginnings, emergence as a deliverer—these parallels are not accidental. But Yeshua is not merely Moses repeated. He is the greater Moses, the one who does not simply lead people out of bondage but leads them fully into the promise of God.
And yet, even here, the pattern holds. Thirty years of obscurity precede His public ministry. There is no rush to spectacle, no bypassing of time. Redemption unfolds patiently, deliberately, and often quietly. The kingdom of God comes not with constant alarm, but like seed in the soil, like leaven in dough—present, active, and easily overlooked.
Which brings us back to us.
We are not Moses, and we are not Yeshua. But we are shaped by the same God, often through the same means. The rabbis teach that a person is led along the path they are already walking. God does not usually remove us from our lives in order to meet us. He meets us within them.
If this coming year feels ordinary—if it feels like more of the same—that does not mean it will be empty. Moses did not know he was being prepared to lead a people while he was learning how not to lose sheep. What feels like waiting may, in fact, be formation. What feels like repetition may be refinement.
Which is why the words of Elizabeth Barrett Browning remain so arresting:
“Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes.”
The tragedy is not that God is absent from our lives. It is that we so often walk past burning bushes without noticing them—distracted by noise, numbed by urgency, convinced that meaning must arrive with spectacle.
We are now a week past the turning of the year, back in the rhythm of things. But perhaps that is exactly where God is waiting—not in the headlines, not in the crises that rise and fall, but in the ordinary ground beneath our feet. The question before us is not whether heaven is present, but whether we will see it—and having seen it, whether we will pause long enough to remove our shoes.