God always manifests Himself in surprising ways. His way of revealing Himself, often contradicts human logic. If you ask me, “Where God does often hide and manifest Himself,” I will tell you: “the routine”; it is where you least expect to find the Lord. He likes to surprise us!
Although there is a constant presence of God in the life of each of us, there are times when this presence is expressed through “events” theopanies: an unpredictable epiphany that marks the life of the individual as well as transforms him or her. And this theophany usually happens within everyday routine.
Prayer is an example. Commonly pray at the same time, and the same place; sometimes we do the same prayer when it comes to liturgy. However, at a given moment, a biblical word or understanding of something, which until then remained hidden, “jumps”off the page with a something new we never expected. Hence, the necessity of perseverance.
Moses was a man who witnessed many theophanies events in his life. The first happened on the “mountain of God, Horeb” (Exodus 3.1). In the customary gesture of feeding the flock of his father-in llaw, so to speak, he was caught unawares by God himself. Understand that the prophet was not on the mountain to pray – that he will do later – but he was there to work. What is something intriguing.
“God always manifests Himself in surprising ways. His way of revealing, often contradicts human logic “
God, in different circumstances, “shows up” to people who are at prayer in the Temple, usual place of divine epiphany. This is the case, for example, Zechariah (see Luc 3, 8-14) and Samuel (cf. I Sam 3, 3-11) to name a few. Moses is different! God manifested Himself in the routine. This certainly was decisive in the life of the son in law Jethro.
Later, Moses will make the experience of spending forty years in the desert in front of a “hard-headed people”, but with the assurance that “every day was made by the Lord” (Ps 118: 24). I wonder how much must be exhausted spending four decades seeing every day, the same thing: an endless expanse of sand. However, the man “taken the waters” during his pilgrimage, witnessed events that transcend the sameness of the desert and became their greatest days of hope. After all, God reveals Himself in ways never before revealed.
The prophet did not actually take possession of the Promised Land; however, I can not imagine coming to the end of life, frustrated or disappointed with God. Instead, when he died, “his view was not weakened and his vitality had not abandoned him” (Dt 34.7), certainly because he understood and attested that God hides and reveals Himself in the routine.