One of the ways Proclaim supports leaders is through a monthly devotional written by one of the Proclaim chaplains. Here is the September devotional from Angela Nelson.
by Angela Nelson, Proclaim Chaplain & Guest Blogger
I have officially lived in New England for a whole entire year. Weird. Super weird. I came out east to live with my best friend while looking for work and waiting for a call, and I have no idea how an entire twelve months have gone by. More than that, really, since I spent the first month looking for work and am next week marking a year of working at Target (10% employee discount!).
It has also been a year since I drove four days in a row to and from my seminary roommate’s Ordination in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Good ol’ U.P. that always gets left off the Michigan maps. GORGEOUS drive at the end of September. Absolutely stunning, just like New England in the fall.
Which is where this devotion starts, really. Fall is my all-time favorite season. I don’t know if it’s the excuse to wear sweaters and drink hot cider, or the newness of every school year and excitement of learning that comes with the season. But the best part, in my opinion, is the smell. The smell, and the trees ablaze with color. Except, as I think about it, the smell is really the smell of death, isn’t it? Leaves dying in a blaze of glory and crunching under foot, giving off the smell of their own break-downs.
And at the same time, those leaves all red and yellow and gold (maybe not so much in Texas or in the Pacific NorthWest or in Alaska, I know) also bring to mind the story of the call of Moses after he ran away from his foster family and had made himself a new family. A call to his own kind of death and resurrection into a new ministry, and a new life, and a lot more bickering in a family lost in the wilderness for a generation.
In the middle of all of that, with Moses stuttering that he doesn’t know how to speak (and then, as one Rabbi lately said, he doesn’t stop speaking for something like 40 chapters!), in the middle of all of that is God’s NAME. The Name so holy some still refuse to pronounce it, or even to write it in it’s entirety. The Name so much alive that it is in the present tense. The Name at the crossroads, when everything around Moses is about to turn into plagues and argument and wandering and bickering and hungering and thirsting. The Name which shades the people with cloud in the wilderness and leads them with fire until they come to the home God promised them.
Whatever Autumn looks like where you are. Whatever is changing, whatever is challenging, whatever is celebrating, whatever is dying and being reborn, the Name is still I AM. Are you staring at a burning bush? Remembering one from long ago? Still waiting to be captured by one out of the corner of your eye on a seemingly ‘normal’ day? Remember Who it is setting you ablaze, Who it is calling to you, Who it is Who IS, and was, and will be, world without end.