Always take your shoes off! Ask yourself, does the ground under your feet right now matter to God? Not the ground or place you hope to reach someday, once life settles and faith feels sturdier. Where you are right now as you read this. This ordinary moment with its unfinished business and its questions that refuse to resolve or make sense.
We’ve just come through a long summer, the kind that bakes the earth until it cracks. Walk out in bare feet after weeks like that and you feel every stone. Moses knew that kind of ground far better than we do. He’d spent years in wilderness heat, where the dust never settled and danger hid wherever you weren’t looking. Thorns underfoot. Mud and rocks baked hard by the sun. Scorpions tucked into places you couldn’t see until it was too late (I have the t-shirt). Out there, footwear wasn’t fashion, even if it carried a brand name that you want others to notice you in. It was the one thing standing between you and the ground trying to hurt you.
And look where Moses actually was in his life when this happened. Not leading anything. Not planning anything. Forty years had passed since he’d fled Egypt as a man with ambition and a some serious character stuff that got him into trouble. And now? Now he was just enduring the daily monotony of feeding and watching over someone else’s sheep, hour after hour, day after day, out on the far side of the wilderness. Over there. No vision. No five year plan. No sense that anything was about to change. There was a season, not too long ago, when employers loved asking that question in interviews, thinking it clever. Where do you see yourself in five years? What’s your greatest weakness? As if a tidy answer proved you had your life sorted. Questions the interviewers could barely answer themselves. Moses couldn’t have given a good answer. Time had simply drifted, the way it does when you stop expecting it to lead anywhere, or for anything to happen. If you’d asked him at breakfast that morning what he was going to do about his situation, he probably couldn’t have told you. There wasn’t a situation to do anything about. There was just the next sheep, the next hill, the next ordinary day. And lots more sun.
Then a bush caught fire and stayed whole, and God spoke from the middle of it as Moses drew near curiously. He didn’t say make yourself comfortable Moses. He said the opposite. “Do not come near; take your sandals off your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground” (Exodus 3:5). God waits until Moses is about to come near and then tells him not to!
Moses kicked off whatever ancient equivalent of Sketchers or Loakes he was wearing and stood there exposed. The ground hadn’t softened. The danger hadn’t left. What changed was Moses, in that instant deciding the presence of God mattered more than his own protection.
Sit with how uncomfortable that actually is. We’d rather God clear the thorns first. Deal with the scorpions. Cool the ground down. Sort our #1 problem out. Show us how the story ends, and then we’ll consider trusting Him with it. But that’s rarely how God works. Sometimes He asks for the very thing you’re using to feel secure. Not because He enjoys watching you go without it, but because faith has to learn the difference between protecting yourself and actually trusting Him. Moses stood barefoot on hostile ground. He wasn’t left there alone. God was standing in it with him.
That might be closer to your scenario than you’d care to admit. Maybe you genuinely don’t know what you’re going to do about the situation you’re in. No plan is forming. No clarity is coming. You’re just getting through the days the way Moses was getting through his, one flock, one hill at a time. No BT Openreach signal out in that wilderness either, notice. No way to check in, search for answers, call someone who might understand. Just Moses, the fire, and a voice that is telling him to take off his Doc Martins.. Taking your shoes off doesn’t mean pretending the thorns aren’t thorns, or pretending you’ve suddenly got a plan when you don’t. It means realising your circumstances, and your lack of answers, don’t get the final word on where you’re standing. God does.
Moses had no idea how far this would eventually go. He didn’t plan for this or ask for it. He was as surprised about it as much as you would be. The God who told him to keep his distance would one day close that distance completely. Jesus stepped into our dust and our danger. He didn’t watch our suffering from somewhere safe. He walked our ground, carried what we deserved, and went to a cross that should have been ours. Because of that, Hebrews can say, “let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith” (Hebrews 10:22).” We come near not because God became less holy, but because Jesus made a way for people who weren’t.
So take a proper look at what’s under your feet. Scorched ground from a long summer. Thorns that haven’t gone anywhere. A future you still can’t map out, no matter how hard you try. None of that has to change before God meets you there. He was never waiting for the ground to be safe. He was waiting for you to stop trusting the ‘sandals‘ and start trusting Him.
That’s the whole point of holy ground. It was never about what you’re standing on.
It was about who’s standing there with you.
