April 1.
From Royalty To Riff-Raff

Genesis 46:34

…for every shepherd is an abomination unto the Egyptians.

Moses had received a demotion. Most of us expect promotions, but sometimes God demotes us in order to promote us. Yes, God does that sometimes. Moses had spent forty years in Pharaoh’s house as Pharaoh’s grandson. And Moses had everything that any prince or king would want to have. Moses was faring well. He was doing good, but at the age of forty he chose to suffer the afflictions of God’s people rather than enjoy the pleasure of sin for a season. Somehow he detected that the stuff he was doing wouldn’t last. And if you are going to survive in life, you need to get a hold of something and somebody that will last. So Moses moved from the bright city lights to the dim quiet nights on the backside of the desert.

It’s not hard to be riding a city bus and continue to ride it, but it’s difficult when you have to lose a Lexus, a Jaguar, or a Lincoln and have to move to riding the city buses. It’s not as easy as it would be if you had never been used to a Lexus before. It’s not hard to move from neck bones to T-bones, but it’s kind of hard to give up T-bones for neck bones. It isn’t easy to be demoted. Maybe we could handle the neck bones instead of T-bones, because they are both red meat. But we begin to worry about what people will say just because of the fact that people will shake their heads sadly saying, “Look how far they came.”

So God pulled Moses away from Pharaoh’s house and put him on the backside of the desert where he stayed for forty years. I mean he moved from a street address to a box number. He moved to the backside – to the desert where they had no cell phones, moving from comforts of a home to living out in the open. His job status of shepherd was at the bottom of the list, and even at that he didn’t own his own sheep. He was watching his father-law’s sheep. Moses was in a tough spot. But God was watching Moses.