Our Tenth Companion: Joseph
. . . who traveled light.
[His brothers] sold him to the Ishmaelites... and they took Joseph to Egypt.
(Genesis 37:28)
Thinking of our lives as a journey, we focus naturally on goals - where we hope to arrive, how far we must travel to get there.
But there's another kind of journey each of us must take - sometimes over and over: the trip to the place we never wanted to go. Maybe it's early widowhood... a crushing financial reverse... just the process of aging. Perhaps it's a literal trip like the one neighbors of ours took recently to a midwestern mental hospital where their college sophomore daughter had just been committed.
Whatever the crisis, there you are, on this unwelcome journey, surrounded by people and circumstances far from your own choosing, expected to function at unfamiliar tasks when your whole being cries out to return to the way things used to be.
Joseph is good company on such a trek. What must his thoughts have been on that bitter march through the Negev, the hottest part of the Syria-Egypt caravan route, hands bound behind him, throat thick with the dust raised by hundreds of camels. Every painful step was taking him farther from the home where everything had been going his way.
Favorite child of a wealthy father, he'd been exempt from the physical labor expected of his brothers. Older translators had it that his father gave him a coat "of many colors," but a more accurate rendition is a "a long coat with sleeves" - the coat of a gentleman who does not need to work with his hands.
From a position of privilege he'd plunged to the status of a slave - a nonperson - hauled against his will into a menacing land.
Unneeded luggage: "It's not fair!"
It would be understandable if Joseph - if we - gave in to self-pity. Especially as it all came about while he was doing what his father told him to! Disaster had struck through no fault of his own, and the sense of injustice could have become the heaviest burden on this unwelcome march.
Nor did the unfairness stop there. When, making the best of a negative situation, Joseph managed through hard work to carve out a respected position for himself as a slave, a second undeserved blow fell. Falsely accused of a shameful crime, he was removed from his post and thrown into prison.
It makes me think of a former schoolmate left at her husband's death with two young children and mammoth hospital bills. By going without new clothes or vacations or bicycles for the children, she managed to build up a small greeting-card business - only to have her partner make off with the money, leaving her once again saddled with debts.
Unneeded luggage: "What's the use in trying?"
The objective problems my friend faced at this point were daunting enough. What made them overwhelming was the load of emotions she had to carry along with them. "What's the use?" became her answer to all offers of assistance.
Repeated blows often lead to this sense of hopelessness. For Joseph they did not. We know this because of the way he acted. Despair paralyzes, but Joseph threw himself with immense energy into each new situation, however distasteful. In prison he was soon singled out, as he had been in slavery, as a natural administrator.
Obviously Joseph "traveled light"; he didn't drag with him a burden of destructive feelings. What was his secret?
The Lord was with Joseph.
Joseph knew that there is no land so far, no dungeon so deep that God does not precede us here. Cut off from friends and family, locked behind bars, he is not cut off from God.
Unneeded luggage: "They did me in."
There was a last piece of baggage - the bulkiest, most encumbering of all - which Joseph might well have lugged to his grave.
Resentment.
Almost any misfortune seems bearable except the one brought on by the malice of other people. Illness, accident, earthquake, these may tempt us to self-pity, even despair - but betrayal invites the bitterness that corrodes the soul.
My school friend, so courageous and resourceful in coping with debt brought about by her husband's cancer, was utterly unable to deal with the same thing caused by the dishonesty of her partner.
Joseph's problems too were the result of human ill will: his brother's jealousy, a frame-up by his master's wife. And still another example of human fallibility awaited him: A fellow prisoner to whom he had rendered a service was released... and promptly forgot about the good word he was to put in on Joseph's behalf. It slipped his mind for two whole years - years that Joseph, down in the dungeon, might have spent brooding on the faithlessness of human nature.
But human nature was not where his attention was fixed. His eyes were on God. Not: "What have people done?" But: "What is God doing?"
Setting down that unwanted luggage
Forgiveness is the theological name for what we do when we put down our suitcasefull of wrongs and injuries. People who worked with concentration camp survivors after World War II reported that those who were able to forgive were able to resume their life journeys; those who held on to their resentments were condemned to walk forever the treadmill of the past.
How can we forgive the monstrous and terrible? Joseph shows us. The way is not to deny the awfulness of what has happened - the dishonest partner, the scheming brothers, the ovens of Auschwitz. Glossing over the truth only separates us from Truth himself. "You meant evil against me," Joseph tells his brothers. To call their action anything but evil would be a lie. But that's not the whole story - or even the important part. "You meant evil, but God meant it for good."
Try substituting the name of whoever is wronging you in place of Joseph's brothers. "(Fred,) (The management,) (The burglar who broke into my home) mean evil against me, but God means it for good."
Joseph lived to see with his own eyes the good that God intended. Whether you and I do or not, we can echo his words to his brothers, along whatever dark path our journey leads: "It was not you who sent me here, but God." (Gen. 45:8).
LORD, when my route leads into Egypt, it is enough for me that You know why.
Meet our next companion now >
[His brothers] sold him to the Ishmaelites... and they took Joseph to Egypt.
(Genesis 37:28)
Thinking of our lives as a journey, we focus naturally on goals - where we hope to arrive, how far we must travel to get there.
But there's another kind of journey each of us must take - sometimes over and over: the trip to the place we never wanted to go. Maybe it's early widowhood... a crushing financial reverse... just the process of aging. Perhaps it's a literal trip like the one neighbors of ours took recently to a midwestern mental hospital where their college sophomore daughter had just been committed.
Whatever the crisis, there you are, on this unwelcome journey, surrounded by people and circumstances far from your own choosing, expected to function at unfamiliar tasks when your whole being cries out to return to the way things used to be.
Joseph is good company on such a trek. What must his thoughts have been on that bitter march through the Negev, the hottest part of the Syria-Egypt caravan route, hands bound behind him, throat thick with the dust raised by hundreds of camels. Every painful step was taking him farther from the home where everything had been going his way.
Favorite child of a wealthy father, he'd been exempt from the physical labor expected of his brothers. Older translators had it that his father gave him a coat "of many colors," but a more accurate rendition is a "a long coat with sleeves" - the coat of a gentleman who does not need to work with his hands.
From a position of privilege he'd plunged to the status of a slave - a nonperson - hauled against his will into a menacing land.
Unneeded luggage: "It's not fair!"
It would be understandable if Joseph - if we - gave in to self-pity. Especially as it all came about while he was doing what his father told him to! Disaster had struck through no fault of his own, and the sense of injustice could have become the heaviest burden on this unwelcome march.
Nor did the unfairness stop there. When, making the best of a negative situation, Joseph managed through hard work to carve out a respected position for himself as a slave, a second undeserved blow fell. Falsely accused of a shameful crime, he was removed from his post and thrown into prison.
It makes me think of a former schoolmate left at her husband's death with two young children and mammoth hospital bills. By going without new clothes or vacations or bicycles for the children, she managed to build up a small greeting-card business - only to have her partner make off with the money, leaving her once again saddled with debts.
Unneeded luggage: "What's the use in trying?"
The objective problems my friend faced at this point were daunting enough. What made them overwhelming was the load of emotions she had to carry along with them. "What's the use?" became her answer to all offers of assistance.
Repeated blows often lead to this sense of hopelessness. For Joseph they did not. We know this because of the way he acted. Despair paralyzes, but Joseph threw himself with immense energy into each new situation, however distasteful. In prison he was soon singled out, as he had been in slavery, as a natural administrator.
Obviously Joseph "traveled light"; he didn't drag with him a burden of destructive feelings. What was his secret?
The Lord was with Joseph.
Joseph knew that there is no land so far, no dungeon so deep that God does not precede us here. Cut off from friends and family, locked behind bars, he is not cut off from God.
Unneeded luggage: "They did me in."
There was a last piece of baggage - the bulkiest, most encumbering of all - which Joseph might well have lugged to his grave.
Resentment.
Almost any misfortune seems bearable except the one brought on by the malice of other people. Illness, accident, earthquake, these may tempt us to self-pity, even despair - but betrayal invites the bitterness that corrodes the soul.
My school friend, so courageous and resourceful in coping with debt brought about by her husband's cancer, was utterly unable to deal with the same thing caused by the dishonesty of her partner.
Joseph's problems too were the result of human ill will: his brother's jealousy, a frame-up by his master's wife. And still another example of human fallibility awaited him: A fellow prisoner to whom he had rendered a service was released... and promptly forgot about the good word he was to put in on Joseph's behalf. It slipped his mind for two whole years - years that Joseph, down in the dungeon, might have spent brooding on the faithlessness of human nature.
But human nature was not where his attention was fixed. His eyes were on God. Not: "What have people done?" But: "What is God doing?"
Setting down that unwanted luggage
Forgiveness is the theological name for what we do when we put down our suitcasefull of wrongs and injuries. People who worked with concentration camp survivors after World War II reported that those who were able to forgive were able to resume their life journeys; those who held on to their resentments were condemned to walk forever the treadmill of the past.
How can we forgive the monstrous and terrible? Joseph shows us. The way is not to deny the awfulness of what has happened - the dishonest partner, the scheming brothers, the ovens of Auschwitz. Glossing over the truth only separates us from Truth himself. "You meant evil against me," Joseph tells his brothers. To call their action anything but evil would be a lie. But that's not the whole story - or even the important part. "You meant evil, but God meant it for good."
Try substituting the name of whoever is wronging you in place of Joseph's brothers. "(Fred,) (The management,) (The burglar who broke into my home) mean evil against me, but God means it for good."
Joseph lived to see with his own eyes the good that God intended. Whether you and I do or not, we can echo his words to his brothers, along whatever dark path our journey leads: "It was not you who sent me here, but God." (Gen. 45:8).
LORD, when my route leads into Egypt, it is enough for me that You know why.
Meet our next companion now >