* I wonder if Moses got it in one.

God got Moses' attention as he walked around his daily routine by having a bush by the way burn and not be destroyed, just keep on burning. Moses stopped, looked, and God gave him a difficult assignment.

I wonder if that was God's first try and getting his attention, or if he had walked by other unusual nature moments, maybe subtler.

Moses definitely didn't get it in one in accepted the assignment. He gave God four reasons why he shouldn't go back to Egypt, which he had fled, and tell the Pharoah to let a bunch of enslaved people go.

Hot blooded courage and courage when you can think. Moses had fled Egypt because he had killed a supervisor who was beating an Israelite slave. This probably didn't improve things for anybody. The slave's life wasn't better from that day, and in many similar cases his life would be worse for being around for that.

But to go back and solve the big problem, the context of the beating.

Moses kept coming up with reasons why not.

He had a speech impediment. Speaking was easy.

God said, Your brother Aaron will speak for you.

So an accurate movie would have 2 guys facing Pharoah. Instead of one deep voiced guy, two, one not speaking, one speaking, presumably, well, conferences between talks.

Note that God was also telling Moses he could have company when he confronted power.

The two people confronting the pharoah, one the speaker, one the leader, is right there in the text, though it hasn't been presented in a movie.

What some people see as having been in the story once, but largely erased, is a story of not two siblings but three. Some people see that Moses looked like a leader, Aaron talked like a leader, and Miriam, their sister, thought like a leader.

There is little left of Miriam in the Exodus story. There's a story of God giving her leprosy as punishment for something. God also takes away the leprosy after a while. But she isn't presented as a leader, as part of the leadership team and definitely not as the brains of the team.

What if she was part of the leadership team, and the smart part? Then the story was made to give her leprosy to predict show and illustrate where women would mostly be in terms of open leadership for next few thousand years.

How to be the brains. There's definitely more room for some of us to think and lead at the same time. But what would that be like? Many of our example aren't great. Even the relatively good examples of leadership may be far short of what we could achieve if we knew to aim for it.

Is God out there burning but not destrying on this issue? Are we seeing what there is to see? Are we generating excuses?