Tell Me the Dream Again: Healing and Wholeness After Hiding Uzorak

Moses was afraid, thinking, “Everyone knows what I did.” And sure enough, Pharaoh heard what had happened, and he tried to kill Moses. But Moses fled from Pharaoh and went to live in the land of Midian.

When Moses arrived in Midian, he sat down beside a well.

Exodus 2:14-15, nlt

When I first started walking with God, I was comforted by the thought of becoming “a new creation.” I loved hearing about how the old was gone and the new could come. I wanted to shed the skin of how I’d been made so I could camouflage myself into the communities I chose. It didn’t help that many others told me that placing my identity in Christ meant not only that my ethnic details were secondary but that they no longer mattered at all.

I traveled to new places and cultures, often feeling a fleeting sense of liberation from who I was and all the things I saw as imperfections or blights to belonging. I thought I could leave them in the dark of yesterday. I became good at hiding on the outside while an invisible storm brewed on the inside. I kept myself from the shalom God wanted for me.

Moses ran far away and started and new life, and yet, far from forgetting the past or discarding his bi-cultural identity, it was in that faraway place where God met him and led him back to who he was and who he had been. God found him and led him onto the holy ground that would launch him (and so many others because of it) back to the place and people he’d run from—out of hiding and toward communal restoration and wholeness, or shalom.

God wants to meet us, like he met Moses, in all the details we think we can discard. Placing our identity in Christ doesn’t mean erasing our upbringing, ethnicity, or heritage; it means seeing every part of our identity, especially the parts we’ve hidden or rejected, through the lens and covering of Jesus’ perfect love.