The burning bush was always burning.
Moses just stopped.

The bush was on fire before Moses looked up. That detail keeps stopping me every time I read it.

Moses was just doing his job. Tending his father-in-law's flock, out in the wilderness, doing what you do when you have responsibilities and the original plan did not work out and forty years have passed and you have more or less made peace with your life. He was not on a retreat. He was not fasting. He was not doing anything that looked spiritual from the outside.

And then he saw it. A bush on fire. Not being consumed. And what the text says next is the thing that gets me. Moses says, "I will turn aside to see this great sight." He made a choice to stop and look.

Did you catch that? God spoke when Moses turned aside. Not before. Not to stop him in his tracks from a distance. God waited to see that Moses was actually stopping. And then the conversation started.

The burning bush was not a new development. It had been burning. The question was whether anyone was slowing down enough to notice something unusual and then actually go look.

What if this is still how it works?

I do not mean that in a vague way. I mean it very specifically. What if there are things around you right now, ordinary things, that are burning? Not literally. But burning in the sense that God is in them, present, doing something, and the moment that is missing is just the turning aside to see?

I have had this experience. Not with a bush. But with a song that came on at the exact right moment and I almost kept scrolling. With a sentence in a book that I almost skimmed. With a conversation that I almost wrapped up quickly because I had somewhere to be. The ones where I slowed down, even slightly, were the ones where something happened.

This is not about making everything dramatic or assigning spiritual significance to your coffee. It is more honest than that. It is about the possibility that the holy is not as rare as we think, and that our pace is the actual problem. Not God's absence. Our speed.

The turning is the whole thing.

Moses could have walked on. There were sheep to manage. He could have noted the unusual fire from a distance and kept moving, telling himself he would think about it later. He did not. He turned aside.

That is the spiritual practice right there. Not a forty-day fast, not a pilgrimage, not a perfectly ordered quiet time. A turn. A decision to stop and actually look at the thing that seems like it might be worth looking at.

You do not have to manufacture encounters with God. But you might have to be willing to stop for them when they show up in ordinary places, wearing ordinary disguises.