Every mechanic knows the particular frustration of an engine that refuses to turn over on the first attempt — the starter motor groaning, the whole vehicle shuddering, nothing catching, until suddenly, on the third or fourth try, it fires to life and runs as smoothly as if it had never hesitated at all. Nobody bothers about the reluctant start once the engine is running well down the road. The car doesn’t carry a permanent mark of shame for having needed a few tries.
What matters, in the end, was never the smoothness of the ignition. It was whether the engine, once running, actually got the vehicle where it needed to go.
Scripture is full of exactly this kind of reluctant ignition — men who stalled, protested, and made excuses before God’s calling on their lives finally caught.
Moses and the Five Excuses
When God called Moses from the burning bush, Moses didn’t respond with confident obedience. He responded with a string of objections, each one more specific than the last:
“But Moses said to God, ‘Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and that I should bring the children of Israel out of Egypt?’” — Exodus 3:11, NKJV
God answered that one. Moses raised another — what if they don’t believe me? God gave him signs (Exodus 4:1-9). Moses raised a third — I’ve never been eloquent, I am slow of speech (Exodus 4:10). God offered to be his mouth. And then, finally, Moses simply said what he’d apparently meant from the start:
“But he said, ‘O my Lord, please send by the hand of whomever else You may send.’” — Exodus 4:13, NKJV
Notice — Scripture doesn’t record God abandoning Moses after four rounds of resistance. It records God growing angry, yes (Exodus 4:14), but still providing Aaron as a solution rather than withdrawing the call entirely. The most consequential deliverance in the Old Testament was carried out by a man who very nearly talked God into picking somebody else.
Gideon and the Fleece
Gideon’s calling begins with an angel greeting him with a title that must have sounded almost sarcastic given the circumstances — Gideon was hiding in a winepress, threshing wheat in secret to keep it from raiding enemies, when he heard:
“The LORD is with you, you mighty man of valor!” — Judges 6:12, NKJV
Gideon’s response wasn’t gratitude. It was a complaint, followed by an excuse about his family’s low status (Judges 6:13, 15), followed by not one but two separate requests for God to prove Himself with a fleece of wool — first wet with dew while the ground stayed dry, then dry while the ground stayed wet (Judges 6:36-40). God, remarkably, obliged both times, without rebuke. The man history remembers as a mighty judge of Israel began his story asking God for repeated proof, from a hiding place, doubting his own worth the entire time.
Jonah and the Boat Going the Other Way
Jonah’s reluctance is the most dramatic of all, because unlike Moses or Gideon, he didn’t just protest — he actively fled:
“But Jonah arose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the LORD. He went down to Joppa, and found a ship going to Tarshish; so he paid the fare, and went down into it, to go with them to Tarshish from the presence of the LORD.” — Jonah 1:3, NKJV
Notice that phrase repeated twice in a single verse — from the presence of the LORD. This wasn’t hesitation. This was outright rebellion against a specific, direct assignment. And yet, after the storm, the fish, and three days of what must have been the strangest prayer meeting in Scripture, Jonah still ends up exactly where God had sent him, preaching exactly the message God gave him, with results so effective that an entire pagan city repented (Jonah 3:5-10). God’s calling on Jonah’s life survived Jonah’s own attempt to sail in the opposite direction.
A Story Worth Sitting With
I know a man who fell in love with reading as a boy, long before he had any inkling it would shape the rest of his life. While other children spent whatever pocket money or gifts came their way on sweets, roasted corn, or an hour on a rented bicycle, he saved his for comics first, and increasingly, as he grew older, for real books — spending what little he had on volumes that promised him worlds he couldn’t otherwise reach. The habit only deepened once he began earning his own income; a deliberate portion of every salary, from his very first job, went straight toward building what would eventually become a home library running into the thousands — books stacked on shelves, then on floors, then in boxes once the shelves ran out of room entirely. His reading was never confined to fiction or general interest. He read history, comparative religion, and pored over the Bible itself with the same seriousness he brought to everything else, determined to actually understand rather than simply absorb.
When the call to ministry eventually came, he resisted it for years, the way Moses and Gideon and Jonah each resisted in their own fashion — not out of rebellion exactly, but out of a genuine sense that he lacked whatever pedigree such a calling seemed to require. It took a visiting minister from overseas, offering him a single analogy that cut straight through years of hesitation, before he finally yielded to what had apparently been waiting for him all along.
Even after embracing that calling, a second reluctance lingered. His wife, and more than a few others who’d sat under his teaching over the years, kept encouraging him to write down the insights he shared so freely in conversation and from the pulpit — the scriptural connections, the observations about life, the kind of teaching people remembered long after they’d heard it. He waved the suggestion away for decades, convinced he lacked the credentials to put his name on a page the way “real” authors did. It wasn’t until his late fifties, after losing his wife — the very person who had encouraged him longest and most patiently — that he finally sat down and began writing in earnest. The response from those who read what he’d written was enough to convince him, far too late by his own reckoning, that he should have listened to her, and to the others, decades sooner. He has written several volumes since, with more still coming, and speaks of the work now not as an achievement but as a stewardship — a gift he was entrusted with far earlier than he ever gave God credit for.
Why Reluctance Was Never Disqualifying
It would be easy to read these stories and conclude that God simply prefers confident, willing servants and merely tolerates the reluctant ones as a fallback. Scripture suggests almost the opposite. Paul makes the pattern explicit:
“For you see your calling, brethren, that not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called. But God has chosen the foolish things of the world to put to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to put to shame the things which are mighty.” — 1 Corinthians 1:26-27, NKJV
The reluctance itself often becomes part of the evidence, later, that the outcome wasn’t manufactured by human confidence at all. Nobody watching Moses stammer at the burning bush, or Gideon demand a second fleece, or Jonah booking passage in the opposite direction, would have predicted an exodus, a judge, or a revival. That gap between the reluctant beginning and the eventual fruit is, itself, part of what makes the story unmistakably God’s doing rather than man’s.
Five Questions Worth Sitting With
- Is there a calling I’ve resisted the way Moses did — not out of rebellion, but out of a genuine sense of inadequacy?
- Have I ever demanded a “fleece” from God the way Gideon did, and did He answer it with more patience than I expected?
- Am I, like Jonah, actively sailing away from something I already know God has asked of me?
- Have I assumed my own reluctance disqualifies me, rather than considering it might simply be the starting point God intends to work with?
- Who around me is currently stalling at their own burning bush, and could use to hear that reluctance was never actually the disqualifying factor?
Final Word
The engine that hesitates before it catches carries no less power once it’s finally running than the one that started smoothly the first time. Moses stammered his way into leading a nation out of slavery. Gideon doubted his way into becoming a judge. Jonah fled his way, eventually, into the belly of a fish and back onto the very road he’d tried to avoid. None of their reluctance disqualified them. It simply became the backdrop against which God’s own determination stood out all the more clearly. Whatever burning bush, whatever fleece, whatever boat going the wrong direction you’re currently standing at — the calling was never really about how ready you felt. It was about whose hand was actually doing the calling.
I’ve written more about what it means to steward what God places in our hands, however long we delay picking it up, in Entrusted, soon to be added to the library at oludareakinbo.com/my-books.
