Today's passage is Acts 7:17-36.
Stephen continues his story of God fulfilling his promise to Abraham by sending Joseph to Egypt and then Jacob and his sons, the cruelty of Pharoah, the story of Moses raised in Pharoah's court, his attempt to become leader of the Jews when he was forty, then his flight to the desert for forty years until he meets God in the burning bush, who sends him back to Egypt to become the leader of the Jews.
Like Moses, when I was forty, I thought I should be headmaster of a school.
That was my thought, of course, and not God's.
I wasn't even a competent department head at the time, so the idea of becoming a headmaster was nothing more than my pride talking.
Like Moses, I was well educated but my strength was as a teacher not the leader of a school.
I failed to rise above teacher and department head and eventually got fired and ran away to my desert.
I worked as a low-grade landscaper, then moved to part-time teaching, nemployment, esl teaching, teaching in India, and writing stories for school.
Finally God sent me to be principal of a school when I was 60. I wasn't sent to save a school, just help it focus.
God sent me to Wooridle Church just before he made me principal.
Just before I went to Wooridle Church, he gave me my wife.
Without the training of a new marriage and without the spiritual training at Wooridle, I would not have been ready for the job of principal nor the further training it involves, sometimes on a daily basis.
I think Moses ran away for forty years because of fear and a lack of self-esteem.
His pride as an educated social elite was smashed by the rejection of his people.
He wasn't an Egyptian and the Jews didn't want him. He got lost in the desert until God pulled him up short with the burning bush.
My self-esteem has taken a number of blows.
Failing to complete my Ph.D., not being promoted beyond department head in my schools, getting fired, not having my writing applauded, failing to see my first wife's alcoholism, being unemployed and living at the YMCA. All of these events--and many smaller ones!--undermined my sense of worth.
Lack of self-esteem is living in a desert.
It leads to a life of running away, which show up in a lifestyle of few friends and wandering the city or world with no purpose, justifying it by saying you want to be open to whatever comes up.
In teaching it leads to periphrasis, talking all around your subject, never being direct and clear in your answers to students, justifying your lack of clarity by saying they need to find more things themselves, they need to think in a different way.
But it's really a deep-seated fear that you don't know how to answer because you have no answers for yourself or the way you're living.
You're in a desert you don't even see as a desert. Instead of giving life-jackets to your students, you're handing them stones and telling yourself it's good for them to sink, a rationalization of your own floundering, your own instability, your own lack of security.
Over the years, I've seen the damage teachers without self-esteem inflict on themselves and their students.
I've seen it in myself. Today's passage shows it in Moses.
No one has confidence in someone without self-esteem. God had to shake Moses out of it. Me too.
Self-esteem begins when you accept that God loves you and has a purpose for you and your life.
Pastor Kim has been stressing the way to clarity in our life and the first big step is repentance.
So once again I will spend time in repentance, seeking a deeper understanding of who I am and how I got where I am and why I still feel angry and frustrated over certain people and issues.
