In This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us, author Cole Arthur Riley includes a chapter on calling. She states that “some callings come to you only in memory. Some come only on the mouth of someone you trust. Some do not need to be heard in order to be lived…”

The story of Moses is a story about calling, in the context of God’s sovereign plan for His people.

In Exodus 3:10, God tells Moses that He is sending him to tell Pharoah to bring the people of Israel out of Egypt. In subsequent verses, Moses gives the proverbial side eye, the What you talkin’ bout, Willis?, and all the excuses he can muster about why God surely could not be calling him to do this work.

But this calling for Moses had come from the mouth of someone he trusted. Repeatedly, God’s response is, “Go.”

Calling is something you are so convinced of doing, no matter the cost. I imagine Moses was well aware of the cost in his calling. Perhaps the reason he kept trying to back out of his calling was because he would be telling his adoptive family something that they did not want to hear. His adopted family benefitted from having slave labor. Plain and simple. Those same slaves (Moses’ birth family) even helped him out as a child and young adult. And now, he has an encounter with God, understands his identity, and then is called to tell the very people who raised him (his adoptive family), that his blood people need to go free.

In the adoptee world, I have seen this one time if I have seen it twenty. There is an inner freedom or liberation in knowing who you really are. Then, the calling comes, often including telling others that a system that so many have benefitted from, such as adoption, can come with its complexities.

Moses’ story gives us a picture of what it is to walk that road. To limit this as just a story of a baby who floated down river and was saved by a family in power is to cheapen the context of what God was, and is, doing in the lives of many. Moses’ story is about how God chose to use a person’s life—who happened to have a complicated family structure—to enact His ultimate plan of liberation. As a sidenote, I just love how God is always showing up for us and liberating us not only in the physical, but also in the spiritual.

The children of Israel needed to be liberated from captivity, and yes, that is a major part of the story and it needed to happen. The story of the liberation of Israel was also the story that the African slaves held onto to seek liberation from captivity in the U.S. In the physical realm, this story has a large reverberation that has freed and given hope to many—so much so, that Harriet Tubman was nicknamed “Moses.” This story resounds in the spirit, as well, when we sing the words, “Go Down Moses, Way Down in Egypt Land, Tell Ole, Pharaoh, to Let My People Go.”

Moses’ story can motivate us to fight for justice and seek peace. We bring the Spirit of God into places and situations that can be hard, such when a transracial adoptee eats dinner with their adoptive family and does not feel seen for who they are; when a first mom gets push-back for trying to start a ministry in her church; when a same-race Black adoptee hides their emotional issues because there’s no easy answer to questions such as, “You were adopted by Black people. What’s the problem?”

We call on that God to give us the courage to tell Ole Pharaoh to let my people go! After all, liberation is the reason for the calling of Moses. So that even now, in 2025, we can still be liberated in our souls from the things keeping us in shackles, by what took place in the physical oh, so many years ago. We can join with Moses, and hear God’s call on our own lives to seek peace and pursue it, and by that we join in a beautiful story of freedom for all his beloved people.