Forty years by the well
Moses flees to Midian
Moses' first attempt at deliverance ends in a corpse and a panic. He sees an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, looks both ways, kills the man, and buries him in the sand — and the next day learns the thing is known. So the prince of Egypt becomes a fugitive overnight, fleeing for his life from the face of Pharaoh, and the chapter that should have launched his calling instead collapses it. He ends up far away in the land of Midian, and there, drained and undone, he simply sits down by a well. And there he stays. Forty years he stays — tending another man's sheep on the back side of the desert, the prince turned shepherd, the deliverer turned nobody, apparently forgotten by everyone, including, it must have seemed, God. No voice, no sign, no rescue. Only the long silence of obscurity, decade after decade, the old dream of saving his people buried as deep as the Egyptian in the sand. And then, when forty years are fulfilled, an angel of the Lord appears to him out in that wilderness, in a bush wrapped in flame and not consumed. Only after the silent decades does the bush at last begin to burn.
“Moses fled from the face of Pharaoh, and lived in the land of Midian; and he sat down by a well.”
— Of Moses' flight — Exodus 2:15 (WEB)
“When forty years were fulfilled, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in the wilderness of Mount Sinai, in a flame of fire in a bush.”
This is the long Disconnect of exile and obscurity — the break that drops you into hidden, fallow years before the call. The phase asks for endurance more than nerve: to stay faithful through decades when nothing visibly happens, to let yourself be quietly formed in a place no one is watching, and to trust that the silence is preparation, not abandonment.
Some breaks do not arrive as a clean loss with an ending in sight; they drop you into a long obscurity, a stretch where nothing visibly happens and the old dream looks dead. Not a dramatic loss with a clear end, but a wilderness season where nothing visibly happens, where the old dream looks dead and buried and you are tending sheep on the back side of nowhere, sure you have been forgotten. The hardest part is the length of it. A short trial you can endure on adrenaline; it is the decades that test you — the years with no voice, no sign, no evidence the silence will ever break. Moses sat by that well for forty years.
From the inside it must have looked exactly like a story quietly ending. It is not. The season that feels like your life going nowhere may be the hidden workshop where God is forming you, out of sight, for what the impatient earlier you could never have carried. In His time, what felt dead begins to burn. It was the hidden preparation for the thing he could never have done as the impatient prince who killed a man and ran. The shepherd's years were not the deliverer's waste; they were his making.
Do not despise the well, or the silence, or the sheep. The bush burns in its own time.
The renewers God raises up are often shaped in obscurity first, broken off from prominence for long, fallow seasons before they are called out. So it goes for the whole Church. There are stretches of history when the faith seems to vanish from the centers of power, when entire movements are pushed to the margins and written off, and the Body looks to a watching world like a story already over. It is not. The recurring rummage sale Phyllis Tickle described, building on Mark Dyer, is not the Church dying every five hundred years but the Church being cleared and made ready again, much of it unseen. The long obscurity is where the LORD has formed more than one renewal the age had given up on. The bush burns in its own time.
The God who has not forgotten the man by the well. What cannot be shaken is that the silence is not absence; the long obscurity is His workshop, not His neglect. When the visible story seems to have ended and every dream lies buried, the One forming you in the dark remains, and in His time the bush still burns.
- Where am I sitting by a well, sure I have been forgotten?
- Can I trust that the silent, obscure season is preparing me rather than wasting me?
- What is God forming in me, out of sight, that the impatient old version of me could never have carried?
Lord, I have been a long time by this well, and the silence makes me feel forgotten. Teach me that obscurity is Your workshop, not Your neglect. Form in me, out of sight, what I could never have become in the spotlight. And when the time is full, let the bush burn. Amen.