SCL

I don’t know what God has next for me. I feel like a broken record writing that, but that is a question I pepper Him with all the time. And more often than not, instead of “what’s next,” I feel like He keeps challenging me to think about “what’s now.” But sometimes, instead of listening to Him, I do something I’ve written about before, I listen to the little David Caruso on my shoulder.

You may know TV’s David Caruso as the redheaded Spanish Lieutenant Horatio Caine on CSI: Miami, but in 1994 he was redheaded Irish Detective John Kelly on the show NYPD Blue. At the time, NYPD Blue was one of the most acclaimed shows on television.

Caruso was at the top of his game, getting Emmy nominations, setting the tone for shows to follow like the Sopranos and the Shield. Life was great, but then he walked away from it all to pursue a film career. His first two movies after his departure from NYPD Blue were “Kiss of Death” and “Jade.” Don’t worry if neither of those sounds familiar, no one on the planet saw them. They made about a dollar. And for the next seven years Caruso couldn’t get any acting gigs except a string of movies that sound like Steven Seagal films:

• Body Count
• Cold Around the Heart
• Deadlocked
• Black Point
• Session 9

The list goes on and on until he finally landed the aforementioned role on CSI. For some reason though, the media’s lampooning of Caruso’s stupid career move impacted me. I was in college at the time and was making a lot of big decisions. That’s when I started to hear the little David Caruso on my shoulder. When I would stand at a crossroads with two options before me, he’d quietly whisper “Be careful, don’t make the wrong decision, remember Jade. Remember Jade…”

I’d lock up. I’d get nervous that I was going to make a disastrous decision I could never recover from. I was afraid that if I jumped to a new job, after a few months I’d realize that the job sucked while the one I used to work at was amazing. The new job, or my Jade if you will, would go out of business while the old job would be giving their copywriters bags of gold and free passes to waterslide parks.

And I find myself right there, right now. I’m scared that if I write the wrong thing or say no to the right opportunity I’ll completely mess up this ministry God’s building and things will be destroyed beyond repair. Then the little David Caruso on my shoulder will rip off his sunglasses a la CSI and dramatically say to me, “I guess the pen isn’t mightier than the sword.”

But I can’t trust that little David Caruso. He’s a really bad judge of when to wait and when to run. And so were the Israelites.

In Exodus 14 the Israelites are starting their journey out of Egypt. Pharaoh has changed his mind about their freedom and was driving toward them with 600 chariots to sweep in for the kill. The Israelites are trapped between an oncoming army and the Red Sea.

In panic, they tell Moses in verses 11 – 12:

“Didn’t we say to you in Egypt, ‘Leave us alone?’ It would have been better to serve the Egyptians than to die in the desert.”

Moses responds in 13 – 14 by saying:

“Do not be afraid. Stand firm and you will see the deliverance the LORD will bring you today. The Egyptians you see today you will never see again. The LORD will fight for you; you need only to be still.”

“Aww, why ya’ll frontin? God’s got this. Be cool, be cool. Everything is going to be alright,” Moses says. The first time I noticed that verse in my Bible I underlined the line “The Lord will fight for you; you need only to be still.” I remember thinking, “Wow, what a clear, simple reason I can wait. The Lord is going to fight for me. All I have to do is be still. Awesome.”

But then in classic God fashion, in the space between verse 14 and verse 15, He completely changes course.

Then the LORD said to Moses, “Why are you crying out to me? Tell the Israelites to move on.”

I can just imagine Moses, the words “be still” barely out of his bearded mouth, getting that message from the Lord. “What’s that God? Move on? That’s interesting, because I kind of just said wait and there’s, I don’t know probably two million of us and it’s not the easiest crowd to get moving.”

But we don’t see that in the chapter so we can only guess at what Moses thought. Based on what happens next, he probably just turned to the mass of people that were stuck between the Red Sea and certain Egyptian death and yelled, “Go!”

God told Moses to move on, because he had something better planned. He had something bigger and more spectacular and more dramatic than the combined intelligence of every Israelite in that desert could fathom. He was going to march them through what looked like history’s worst recorded dead end, the Red Sea, and wipe out the Egyptian army in one fell swoop. So it wasn’t time to wait, it was time to run.

Traffic lights don’t change yellow before they turn green. They go immediately from red to green. Stop to go. Wait to run. Sometimes it’s like that with God. Wait becomes run within a single breath. Suddenly what felt like it was going to take forever is streaming by you at light speed. And you’re running as fast as you can down the shores of the Red Sea.

Is this a wait or run moment for you right now? I’m not sure. But like Jay-Z said, it’s time to brush the dirt off your shoulder and if you’re at all like me, maybe the little David Caruso too.

• Comment (57)
• Get Feed
• Print This!