Hello again, podcast fans. This morning we’re back on track with Joseph as the main subject of our story after our brief interlude yesterday with Judah. The events in this chapter are pretty famous, and you’ve probably heard them before at some point, so I’m not going to write a whole lot about them. What I would like to point out, though, is that there are times in all our lives when we feel caught between a rock and a hard place, though not perhaps as dramatically as Joseph was, and yet we know that God is still taking care of us.
How can those two conditions coexist? How can it be that we’re stuck somewhere that we feel we don’t belong, and at the same time it’s obvious that God is taking care of us in a big way? Can it be that God wants us to be in bad circumstances? I don’t think so. I think that it’s easy to come to that conclusion, but it’s also easy to forget that God has a longer view than we do. God doesn’t want us to languish in places where we don’t belong any more than He wanted Joseph to rot in prison. However, God sometimes uses the circumstances to bring us to where we do belong in the end. I think the reason we sometimes find ourselves taking the hard way to get to where we need to go is that if we had the choice, we’d never start the journey, but God knows that it’s something we would regret not doing, even though it is sometimes painful. Joseph would never choose to go to prison, but I sure bet he would regret missing out on the opportunity to do what he will in the upcoming chapters, and he himself will explain that it’s all for the best in the end.