On the gap that looks like a dead end
Battle and Blueprint Series | Formed in the Gap | Volume 1
When The Gap Stops Feeling Like Waiting
Some gaps do not feel like waiting. They feel like the story has already ended, and nobody told you. There is a difference between the gap that aches and the gap that has gone numb. The aching gap is hard, but it is alive. You know you are in between. But the numb gap is something else. It is the gap that has lasted so long that the person inside it has stopped expecting anything to change. They are no longer waiting. They have simply settled into a life that looks nothing like the one they once believed they were moving toward.
Moses was eighty years old when he encountered the burning bush.
Eighty years old. Most of us read straight past that detail on our way to the burning bush. But forty years had passed before that bush appeared, and those forty years are the part of the story that most of us are actually living. He had been a prince in the most powerful empire in the world. He had understood himself to be someone with capacity, position, and access. He had acted on what he perceived to be a calling to deliver his people, and it had gone catastrophically wrong, and he had fled into the desert and become a shepherd.
Once, he had lived in power. Now he spent his days making sure nobody’s sheep wandered off. That was the whole of it.
And he had been doing that for forty years.
The Silence That Followed
And here is what makes that silence the hardest part of Moses’s story to sit with honestly. He had not ended up in the desert by accident or gradual faithlessness. He had acted. He had seen the suffering of his people and felt something rise up in him that he believed, reasonably, was more than personal indignation. It had the quality of calling. It had the weight of conviction. And he had moved on it. He had stepped into what he understood to be the beginning of something, and it had collapsed immediately and completely, and he had run, and then there had been nothing. No voice from God explaining what had gone wrong. No correction that would have at least confirmed that the calling was real, even if the method was wrong. No whisper in the night redirecting him.
The desert stretched out around him. The sheep needed tending. And God said nothing.
That is what nobody says out loud when they are in a gap that has gone on too long. It is not just the silence of circumstances. It is the silence of God himself. And it is one thing to wait in a gap when God is quietly present, when the sense of His nearness is available even if the fulfilment is not, when prayer feels like communication even if it does not feel like conversation. It is something else entirely to carry a buried word in a silence so complete that you begin to wonder not just whether you heard correctly but whether the God you thought you heard from is the kind of God who speaks to people like you at all.
That is what it actually feels like inside when the silence has been going on longer than you know how to carry. Moses had no community of faith around him in Midian, affirming that his calling was still alive. He had no prophet speaking over him. He had no record of what he was carrying. He had a father-in-law who was a priest of Midian, a wife, children, sheep, and forty years of silence from the God of his fathers. And somewhere in that silence, he had to decide, daily and without any external confirmation, whether the thing he had once felt was real or whether he had simply been wrong about himself from the beginning.
What he did have, and this is worth naming, was the memory of a God who had always kept what He promised. He knew the story of Abraham. He knew the story of Isaac and Jacob. He had grown up among people whose entire existence was the evidence of divine faithfulness across generations. He could not point to a personal word in those forty years. But he could point to a God whose track record with broken and unlikely and displaced people was longer than his own failure. And some days, in the silence of Midian, that memory was likely the only thing standing between him and the conclusion that he had been wrong about everything. It was not a loud anchor. But it held.
Prince To Shepherd
And underneath the silence was the question of who he now was.
In Egypt, Moses had known exactly who he was. He was the son of Pharaoh’s daughter. He had grown up inside the architecture of power. Acts 7:22 tells us he was educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians and was powerful in speech and action. He had a name that carried weight. He had access to things that most people in the ancient world could not have imagined. He had an identity confirmed every single day by the way people looked at him, spoke to him, and deferred to him. He did not have to wonder who he was. Everything around him told him.
And then he was a shepherd in Midian. Tending someone else’s flock. Living in someone else’s household. Known to no one outside that household as anything other than the foreigner who had married Jethro’s daughter. The name that had meant something in Egypt meant nothing in Midian. The education that had set him apart meant nothing to sheep. The capacity, position, and access that had once defined him were not just unused. They were invisible. There was no one around him who knew what he had once been, and even if there had been, what he had once been was no longer what he was.
What does a person do with that across forty years? Not across four months, when the wound is fresh enough to still feel like grief. Not across four years, when the loss has settled into something that can be named and carried. But across forty years, in which the person you once were recedes so far into the past that you begin to wonder whether you imagined him. Whether the confidence you once had about your own significance was always self-deception. Whether the thing you thought you felt, that rising conviction that you were made for something specific, was simply the arrogance of a young man who had grown up surrounded by power and mistaken proximity to greatness for a calling of his own.
That is what the long gap does that shorter gaps do not. It does not just test your faith in God. It dismantles your understanding of yourself so thoroughly that by the end of it you are not sure there is a self left to be used. And that dismantling, devastating as it is from inside, is precisely the work the gap was doing. Because the man who would stand before Pharaoh and say let my people go could not be a man who believed in his own strength. He had to be a man who had been emptied of that belief so completely that when God called him, the only honest response available to him was who am I.
That question was not a failure of confidence. It was the evidence that the gap had done its deepest work.
Day After Day After Day
Exodus 2:15 says that Moses fled from Pharaoh and stayed in the land of Midian. He sat down by a well. And there he met Zipporah, married her, and had a son named Gershom, which means “foreigner there,” and he lived and worked in Midian for forty years. There is no recorded word from God during that period. No angelic visitation. No prophetic confirmation that the calling he had once felt was still alive. He had sheep to tend and a desert to cross and a life that looked, by every measure anyone could see, like the life of a man whose story had already peaked and was now simply winding down.
But before we move to the burning bush, we need to slow down and look at what those days were actually made of. Because that is where most of us are when a gap has gone on too long. Not in the moments that break you open but in the days that simply keep coming. Moses got up every morning, took the sheep out, and brought them back. He ate. He slept. He spoke to Zipporah. He watched his children grow. He helped Jethro with whatever needed to be done. He lived the ordinary life of an ordinary man in an ordinary place. And every single one of those ordinary days was a day in which the extraordinary thing he had once believed about himself was not confirmed, not referred to, not visible in any way that anyone around him could see.
That is the particular weight of a gap that has gone numb. Not one single moment of collapse, but day after day after day in which nothing changes and the word does not come. In which nothing confirms that what you once believed about your calling was real. In which the life you are living, while not a bad life, is not the life you understood yourself to be moving toward. And the longer it goes on, the more it begins to feel not like a season but like the permanent shape of things. The earlier the story begins, the more it feels like something you invented. The more the person you are becoming in the ordinary feels like the only real version of you, and the person who once believed they were called to something specific feels like a stranger you used to know.
Moses had a name for this. He named his son Gershom, which means foreigner there. He was marking, in the naming of his own child, the experience of his own displacement. He knew he did not belong in Midian. He was not pretending otherwise. He was simply living there, in the only life available to him, carrying the knowledge of his foreignness in the name he gave his son, and getting up the next morning and taking the sheep out again.
That is what faithfulness looks like in a gap that feels like it will never end. Not the kind of faith that looks like faith from the outside. Just the quiet staying, one day at a time, held by something he could not always feel but that kept him where God could find him, within walking distance of the mountain where the fire was waiting.
The Back Side Of The Desert
Exodus 3:1 records that Moses was tending the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian, and he led the flock to the far side of the wilderness and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. That phrase, the far side of the wilderness, is sometimes translated as the back side of the desert. It is not a place of significance. It is the remote end of an already remote landscape. It is about as far from the corridors of Egyptian power as a person can get. And it is there, in the most ordinary moment of an ordinary day in what had become an ordinary life, that the burning bush appeared.
The gap that felt like a dead end was the place where God showed up.
What The Desert Was Building
What the forty years in Midian built in Moses is worth considering carefully, because the man who stood before Pharaoh and led two million people through the wilderness and climbed the mountain of God and received the law and interceded for a stiff-necked people again and again without abandoning them was not the man who had acted impulsively in Egypt at forty. He was someone different. Not in the sense that his calling had changed. But in the sense that the person who would carry it had been fundamentally altered by the decades of hiddenness.
Numbers 12:3 says that Moses was the most humble man on the face of the earth. That is a remarkable description for a man who did the things Moses did. It is also almost certainly a description that could not have been written of the forty-year-old who struck the Egyptian. The humility that led a nation through the wilderness was built in the desert. The capacity to lead without ego, to intercede without bitterness, to receive correction without defensiveness, to remain faithful when the people were anything but faithful in return, these are not the characteristics of a man who has never had his assumptions about himself thoroughly dismantled.
The desert does that. The gap that looks like a dead end does that. It removes the things you were trusting in that were never meant to be trusted. It strips the identity back to something more fundamental. It creates the conditions in which the person who will carry the calling is not the person who assumed they were ready for it, but the person who has stopped assuming anything about their own readiness and has learned to depend on something other than their own capacities.
If you are in a gap that has started to feel like a dead end, if the word has become so buried under the weight of all those ordinary days that you have largely stopped thinking of yourself as someone in a gap and have begun thinking of yourself as someone whose story simply did not go the way it was supposed to, then there is something in this exchange that is worth holding onto with both hands.
When the bush appeared, and God spoke, Moses did not say here I am, ready and willing and finally prepared for the task. He said who am I. After forty years in the desert, that was the most honest thing available to him. He had no confidence left in his own capacity. He had no remaining sense of his own readiness. He had been emptied so thoroughly by the gap that the only response he could offer to the God who was calling him was the response of a man who genuinely did not know what he had left to give.
And God did not fill that question with a list of Moses’s qualifications. He did not remind him of his Egyptian education or his knowledge of Pharaoh’s court or his leadership potential. He answered who am I with I Am who I Am. He met the acknowledgement of human insufficiency not with reassurance about human capacity but with the declaration of divine sufficiency. What you do not have, I Am. Where you are not enough, I Am. The gap that emptied you of your own confidence did not disqualify you from the calling. It created the precise condition in which the calling could finally be carried by something other than your own strength.
And there is something in the name itself that deserves attention. When God said I Am who I Am He was not simply offering a philosophical statement about His own nature. He was declaring that He is the God who has always been and will always be, the God whose existence and faithfulness are not contingent on anything outside Himself, not on human readiness, not on human performance, not on the passage of time, not on the weight of years that all looked the same. The I Am who spoke to Moses at the burning bush was the same I Am who had spoken to Abraham in Ur and to Isaac in the famine and to Jacob at Bethel. The calling He was restating to Moses was grounded not in Moses’s capacity to sustain it across forty years but in the unchanging nature of the One who had spoken it in the first place. The gap had not eroded the word because the word was held by Someone who does not erode. That is the weight the name carries. And it is the weight that made it possible for an eighty-year-old shepherd who had asked who am I to stand before the most powerful ruler in the world and say thus says the Lord.
That is what the long gap is doing to you. Not ending your story. Emptying you of the version of yourself that would have carried the word in your own strength and called it God. The stripping that feels like an ending is the preparation for a beginning that can only happen when the self-sufficiency is gone.
You do not need to feel ready. Moses did not feel ready. You do not need to have maintained your confidence across the years of silence. Moses had not maintained his. You do not need to understand what the gap has been doing or be able to say what it has built in you. Moses could not have told you that either, standing at the back side of the desert with his father-in-law’s sheep.
What you need is to still be there. To still be standing in the ordinary life of the gap, however reduced it feels, however far it is from the life you once believed you were moving toward. To still be within reach of the mountain where the fire is waiting. Because the bush appeared to Moses not when he had recovered his confidence or reconstructed his sense of calling or found a way to believe again with the same intensity he had felt at forty. It appeared on an ordinary day when he was doing his ordinary work in an ordinary place and had no particular reason to expect that this day would be any different from the ten thousand ordinary days that had preceded it.
The gap that feels like a dead end is not outside God’s geography. It is, sometimes, exactly where He goes to find the person He has been quietly making ready for longer than that person has been willing to wait.
Keep going. The bush is not behind you. It is ahead.
Anitha A. Dhanapal