A wonderful old story tells of a shepherd who was herding his flock near an oasis in the Sinai desert. Hot day. VERY hot day!

The sweat dribbled down his forehead and evaporated before it reached his beard. He leaned against a rock, eyes narrowed to thin slits, trying not to move, suffering till evening.

Then, a nearby bush exploded into flame.

Eyes wide open, the shepherd remembered other shrubs catching fire on hot desert days. Their oily bark, combined with blast furnace air, would spontaneously combust into a firestorm. Ten, fifteen seconds at the most, before the bush would use up its fuel and drop as ashes onto the sand.

He squinted, watching for this bush to flame out.

It kept burning. And burning—each flame calling him to come closer and see the magic of its fire.

Forgetting the heat he walked toward the fire, getting as close as he could without barbecuing his cloak.

Then the bush called his name.

“Moses,” the fire said. “Moses!”

Moses, the shepherd, wondered if he was having a heat stroke, tried to remember if he had eaten something dangerous for breakfast, and looked around for a safe place to hide. But his feet, trembling in their leather sandals, wouldn’t move.

“I’m here,” he heard his voice answering the bush.

“Take off your sandals,” the bush responded, “you’re standing on a safe place.”

The shepherd never walked in the desert without his sandals. They protected him from sharp rocks, snakes, scorpions, thorns, and incredibly hot sand. Taking them off would be to remove his safety, to abandon what he knew about protecting himself, to trust the voice in the burning bush.

“Moses,” the voice echoed as he removed his sandals and stood, safe, on cool soft sand.

For the next twenty minutes, God and Moses talked through the bush. God asked Moses to do a long list of impossible tasks, and Moses argued that he couldn’t. God asked again, and Moses still argued that it wouldn’t be safe, or wise, or feasible. Then God said the one thing that got Moses through the next 40 years of his life, a life of doing the impossible for God. It was God’s perfect gift.

“It’s not about you. It’s about me. I am the one who will do it all…through you” (see Exodus 3:14).

As the voice died away, and the flames disappeared, Moses understood the fire. If the flames had been using the bush’s creosote-filled bark as its fuel, it would have quickly burned out. Instead, drawing on Divine Fuel, the bush kept burning, and flaming, and crackling, and brightening the mountainside.

“I can’t,” the shepherd mumbled to himself. Then he looked at the bright-green, un-burned bush. “But He can.”

Dick Duerksen is the director of mission development for Florida Hospital in Orlando.