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What Is That in Your Hand?

“Then Moses answered and said, ‘But suppose they will not believe me or listen to my voice; suppose they say, “The LORD has not appeared to you.”’ So the LORD said to him, ‘What is that in your hand?’ And he said, ‘A rod.’”¹

I have read how a boy who loved to listen to music was bitterly disappointed because he could neither play nor sing. But a kindly gentleman encouraged him with these words: "There are many ways of making music. What matters is the song in your heart." That boy—Antonio Stradivarius—took the man at his word and became the world's greatest violin maker.

I also read about “a well-dressed European woman on safari in Africa. The group stopped briefly at a hospital for lepers. The heat was intense, the flies buzzing. She noticed a nurse bending down in the dirt, tending to the pus-filled sores of a leper.

“With disdain the woman remarked, ‘Why, I wouldn't do that for all the money in the world!”

“The nurse quietly replied, ‘Neither would I.’”²

As God asked Moses (who was feeling very inadequate) when he was calling him to lead the ancient Israelites out of slavery in Egypt, he asks the same question to you and me today, “What is that in your hand?” That is, what are your abilities and talents and how are you using these for the highest purpose? Are they to enrich your own life for your own ends or to help enrich the lives of others?

Suggested prayer: “Dear God, help me to find the most effective way to use my God-given talents and abilities to serve You by serving others in a way that will bring the most glory to Your name. Thank You for hearing and answering my prayer. Gratefully in Jesus’s name, amen.”

1. Exodus 4:1-2 (NKJV).
2. Donald L. Deffner, Seasonal Illustrations, p. 130.

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