Third Sunday of Lent – Cycle C
Reflecting on Exodus 3:1-8a, 13-15
This mysterious God who speaks to Moses from the burning bush is exactly the God we all pray to hear. We long for the God who says, “ I have witnessed your sufferings. I have felt your anxieties. I have heard your prayers for healing of the illnesses and sorrows of your loved ones. I am not far away; I am not indifferent. I have been with you all along, and I am going to act in your regard.”
This God was a wholly new experience for Moses. He had forgotten that he was specially called, and that this was the God who called his father Abraham to travel to a new and distant land eight hundred years earlier.
Yet, here was this VOICE speaking to him on the holy ground of the Burning Bush, compelling him to believe that there was a good God, a God who remembered the promises made to his ancestors, a God who had held him and watched over him from before he was born.
We don’t have the same dramatic story that Moses had. We weren’t placed in a basket and sent down the Nile River, praying that a kind Egyptian princess might find and save us. But maybe we DO have our own precious memory of being held by a loving God, our own experience of a God who is present, who tells us to be not afraid (365 times, by the way).
Be silent today. Listen for the voice that speaks to your heart, telling you again that your life and your sufferings are precious to God, and that God will hear and answer you. We are all praying for you.
What do you long to hear from God?
Kathy McGovern c. 2025