Nobody Said That To Joseph

Dale lost it over about fourteen months and there was no villain in it.

A contract went. Not through anybody's fault: the company at the other end was bought and the new owners had their own people. Then the second one went, partly because of the first. Then the bank did what banks do, and did it correctly, and a man he had known for eleven years said the sentence in a voice that made clear he had not chosen it.

Nineteen years of building. Fourteen months of it going.

He is fifty-three. He works for somebody now, and it is a decent job with decent people, and he does it well, and he is not fine.

The part he cannot get past is not the money.

It is the years. There are four of them now on the other side of it, spent doing nothing but standing back up, and he cannot get them and he cannot get the nineteen either, and when he lies awake it is arithmetic. He does the arithmetic. He knows how old he will be.

And people quote him the verse.

You know the one. Joseph, to his brothers: you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good.

He has had it four times. Two of them were text messages.

And the last time he had to leave the room, and he told his wife afterward that he wanted to put his hand through something, and he has never in his life wanted to do that.

He is not angry at the verse. He read it again that night and he could not fault a word of it.

He is angry because of what it does when somebody else says it about him.

It closes the thing. It puts a lid on it and hands it back with the explanation attached, and he is supposed to say thank you and be lighter, and instead he has one more piece of furniture to carry.

He read the whole account through in one sitting a few weeks after that. Genesis thirty-seven to fifty. He had never done that.

And he came out with two facts he has not been able to stop thinking about.

The first is the number. From the pit to standing in front of Pharaoh is thirteen years. Sold at seventeen, and he is thirty when it turns. Thirteen years, and two of them are in a prison after the cupbearer forgot him, which the text mentions in a single flat sentence.

The second is bigger.

Nobody says the verse to Joseph.

Not once, anywhere in the fourteen chapters. Not in the pit, not in Potiphar's house, not in the prison. There is no friend and no prophet and no messenger. God speaks to Joseph in that whole account in dreams about other people's business, and never once to tell him what any of this is for.

Joseph says it himself, at the end, decades later, in his own mouth, about his own life.

Now let me ask you who has quoted it at you.

Because if this is yours, somebody has, and probably recently, and they meant it well, and you have never told them what it did.

Whose sentence it is

Here is the verse, and I want you to read it noticing who is speaking and when.

As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good in order to bring about this present result, to preserve many people alive.Genesis 50:20

As for you. He is talking to his brothers, and only to them, and the whole speech is a specific man dealing with specific people who did a specific thing to him.

This present result. He is standing in it. He can see it. He is not predicting, he is describing something already visible from where he now is, thirty-odd years after the pit.

That sentence is a testimony. It belongs to Joseph, it was earned by Joseph, and it arrives at the far end of the story in the voice of the person who was in it.

It is not a diagnosis. It was never a tool for a bystander to apply to somebody else's ruin in year two. Handed to a man in the middle, it is not comfort, it is an assertion about a result that nobody can see, made by somebody who is not carrying it.

So hear this said over you, in a workshop at the end of the day with the shutter half down. You are not required to produce Joseph's sentence about your own four years, and you are certainly not required to accept it from anybody else. That is written into who speaks in Genesis 50 and when, and it is the Holy Spirit who intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words, which is what God has actually given a person for the middle of it.

Now let me be careful about what I am not saying.

I am not telling you your business failed for a reason.

I do not know that and neither does anybody else and I am not going to invent one for you. Nothing in this article is going to tell you that the nineteen years were preparation, or that God needed the contract to go, or that in five years you will see it. If I did that I would be the fifth person, and this time in print, and you would be right to shut the tab.

And I am not telling you the verse is untrue.

It is true. God did mean it for good in Joseph's life and Joseph said so and the text agrees with him. That is not in question.

What I am saying is that it is his, and that the same words in somebody else's mouth about your life become a different thing entirely.

Here is what you actually have, and it is less than an explanation and it is more than nothing.

He is working.

Not: it was for the best. Not: it was sent. That He is at work, now, in this, and that what He is doing has not been shown to you and might not be, and the not-showing is not a punishment and it is not a gap in your faith.

Joseph did not have the explanation for thirteen years. He had God with him, which the text says four separate times in those chapters, and it says it in the prison, in the worst part, in exactly the years that look from outside like abandonment.

The word says the Lord was with Joseph, and it says it while he is a slave and it says it again while he is a prisoner, and it never once says that he understood.

And the Spirit of God is the one who helps in our weakness, because we do not know how to pray as we should, and that is God's own description of a person doing arithmetic at three in the morning.