How to meet your own burning bush
God says He is a recursion

How to meet your own burning bush

In the LDS church, you are given a once-in-a-lifetime blessing called the Patriarchal Blessing (when you are qualified); I got mine 2 weeks ago. I have been working on a project to "save the world" (with some exaggeration) for the past 5 years, so I was keen on getting some indication of whether God approved my mission. My blessing confirmed that I did have a mission from God, but did not explicitly state what that is. What it did is catch me by surprise from the opening: "This Patriarchal blessing is like receiving a divine perspective of you."; I guess I wasn't expecting the Patriarchal blessing to be an individualized divine blessing.

For some reason, that sentence reminded me of Moses's burning bush experience–maybe because I am engineer level 5, and ? engineers joke that you have to have a burning bush experience to be promoted to level 6. So I read Exodus 3 closely, several times. In it, the following event transpires:

  1. Moses was just going about a fairly normal Shepard's day; maybe the Horeb mountain was already a sacred place, but probably not, since he let his flock loose there
  2. God appeared as a flame of fire in the midst of a bush, which was not consumed (burned away). Not sure whether the phenomenon was noticed by others before Moses, or how long it took Moses to figure out that this was an extra-ordinary event, but when Moses pays attention, God responds in real-time by calling out his name, and Moses acknowledged the calling. Here lies the first lesson: this God has a peculiar habit of giving you the choice of acknowledging him. In the modern "management-speak", He is a Leader, not a Manager.
  3. God identifies Himself to Moses as his ancestor's God, and Moses is afraid. Maybe the flame became more intense, or something happened to cause Moses to be more fearful?
  4. God offers Moses his mission: bring the children of Israel out of Egypt, and Moses tries to evade the calling; 1) I am nobody 2) the Israelites won't listen to me anyway, and they don't even know who You are; to which God "responds": 1) I am/will be with you [`eh-yeh `im-mak], 2) I am the God of your ancestors, and by the way, my name is I AM [`eh-yeh ?·?er `eh-yeh].

Lots of people have tried to interpret this sentence; for example: I am the nature itself (the nature in Chinese is "the thing that just is by itself"), or I cannot be described with some human given name. Here's my take:

  • 1) seems like a non-answer, but it actually is: "yes you are nobody, but that's irrelevant because I am/will be with you".
  • 2) would make so much sense if [`im-mak] were somehow omitted by mistake or intentionally, because if you happend it, it would then read "I am the being who is with you from the beginning to the end [`eh-yeh ?·?er `eh-yeh `im-mak]–the only being who looks out for you in this Universe. You are so important to me that I will identify myself to you as the one who is with you.

If my interpretation is correct, this is a shockingly moving revelation:

  1. God was and is with us, from the beginning, and is extending himself out to keep being with us eternally, giving us the prerogative.
  2. I cannot think of any other God (including those described in mythology) that identifies himself merely as "the God who is with you"?

In return for such generosity, I want to be with this God, and help Him achieve what He wants: to save as many of the humanity as possible. Perhaps that is one of my mission, and God shows with the example of the burning bush in Exodus 3 that I will NOT be consumed when I make such sacrifice, but rather stay ablaze forever. I never thought of myself as a generous person, but I feel inspired to be a burning bush myself.

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