Day 2927 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Genesis 45:5 NIV

Sometimes God needs someone to step into the chaos so that He can work through them to accomplish His plans. But simply put, very few of us would readily step into the fray and offer our services amidst the struggle brought about by the storms that lie in the way. So He moves all the parts and pieces around in just the right way and just the right timing to ensure things work out just as He has planned them. And though storms and struggles are a clear and obvious part of this story, the fact that those plans always work out in the end is an undeniable fact that we all know full well.

God is always working things for not only our good but also for the good of those around us as well. But often we find that His methods and timings and perspectives are all incredibly different from ours. And it's those differences that have caused a gross degree of dejection among our feeble minds. Our problem is that we expect God to see things the way we see them and to do things in the manner in which we think they should be done.

But thankfully, He isn't limited by our severely limited outlooks on life. In fact, He is the only One who knows what's coming around every corner we've yet to meet in our lives. And even though our egos would like to somehow claim that ability for ourselves as well, the fact is that you and I can barely make it through a day without wandering off into the nothingness that we tend to prefer, let alone actually discern what's about to happen and figure out a way to prepare for it.

Yesterday we discussed the fact that God is always doing some truly great things in our lives, but that our limited willingness to see them has caused us to not only miss the miracles He's working in our lives, but to all but deny that they're happening. We become so laser-focused on such a limited amount of things that we apparently can't allow ourselves the luxury of simply letting God be God and allowing Him the glory that we always seem to want for ourselves.

To say that our perceptions and perspectives are limited is almost too gentle I'm afraid. In order to be more honest and simply more direct, I think it's far fairer to say that our perceptions and perspectives are altogether corrupt and contaminated by this jaded outlook of life that we've adopted. We've fallen deeply for this dejected delusion that God's not working with us or that He doesn't care about what we care about or even that He doesn't want us to be happy in life.

To be rather blunt, it's all simply hogwash that we've created in order to keep our wants and wishes front and center and to afford us the ability to remain aggravated and agitated at all times in life as we simply appear to always prefer to be upset and almost unhinged.

My point that I'm getting to is that God has His reasons for the seasons that we face in this place. He has His priorities and prerogatives that inform and instruct His will and the actions that unfold that fulfill it. He is the One who has written this story in all of its glorious perfection and outstanding outcomes. If we fail to see it that way, well then I'm completely certain that error caused by that lack of understanding falls fully on us as He's not the one who has these limitations and liabilities that we so clearly contend with.

That's basically what we discussed in yesterday's post. We cause so many of our own problems simply because we prefer to hold onto this foolish assumption that we know everything, see everything, hear everything, and can therefore accomplish anything just as good if not better than the One who's already written this story and firmly decided how it's going to go. We keep finding ourselves fighting against the One who is working countless miracles all around and all within these lives we're living.

And we miss it all because it's just not exactly what we want when we want it or how we want it.

But friends, this is not our story. We're just living a little piece of His. He created us. He created this world. He created our time within this place. He creates all of these opportunities and experiences that we get to either enjoy or despise. He set all of this in motion, and considering how it's all managed to work itself out just fine so far, for us to assume that He doesn't know what He's doing is simply as stupid as it gets.

Then again though, we've clearly never really minded being stupid, have we?

I was reading through a bit of Genesis last night and the story of Joseph orchestrating the way through this nearly decade-long famine that Egypt and the surrounding area was experiencing. And just how it all began and the bumps in the road and the clear divine intervention all along the way is something that I think all of us would do very well to always keep in mind.

This is the same Joseph who was sold by his brothers into Egypt. They just didn't like the little guy. They didn't like his dreams of how they would bow before him, after all, he was younger than they so how dare he assume that he would one day be more important than they?

This is the same Joseph who was living as a servant in the house of an Egyptian official whose wife tried to compromise his situation, and eventually did so through a lie that she told her husband who in turn had Joseph tossed in prison.

This is the same Joseph who was literally still a prisoner when he was called before Pharaoh to help interpret these strange dreams of skinny cows and worthless heads of grain that had him completely perplexed and losing sleep.

It was this Joseph who interpreted that those dreams foretold the coming of this period of lavish abundance followed by an equal period of extreme famine. And suddenly, this boy that was unwanted and unwelcome around his brothers, this man who was wasting away in a jail cell for something he didn't do, this foreigner who came from a people not necessarily welcome in Egypt found himself lifted to the second highest position in all of the land.

This Joseph went from being sold as a slave to sitting in a prison to basically running Egypt and helping save countless lives during a time when people could have, and in all reality should have, died because of the circumstances.

But here in chapter 45 we see this Joseph talking with those same brothers who tossed him out of their lives just to get him and his unwelcome dreams out of their way. And what does he say? How does we treat these brothers of his who sold him for a few pieces of silver? Does he respond to them in the ways in which we likely would?

How could you not be angry at those who sold you as a slave and shipped you off to a foreign land in hopes to never see you again? How could you not hate the ones who started this chain of events that led you away from your family into a prison?

Because he knew it wasn't them who had done it. He knew that it was all part of God's perfect plan.

He knew that God had planned for him to be in Egypt to help put the plan into motion that would save all the people it helped during those seven years of suffering. He knew that, while being sold as a slave who landed in prison was a truly unenjoyable season of life, that it led him to being in the right place at the right time, with the right faith, to be a part of one of God’s workings.

How often do we miss out on being a part of that good work that He’s doing simply because we assume that He can’t make something good out of what we think is a bad set of circumstances? How many times do we miss that amazing opportunity to realize that God is working all things for our good simply because they don’t presently look good or feel good? How often do we get angry when things don't look quite so great? How many times do we doubt and question and refuse to believe simply because we don't like how something looks or feels or sounds on the surface?

How much longer can we allow our faith to remain only on the surface?

We miss seeing what God's doing because our hearts remain entirely attached to this inherent doubt that tells us that it's all falling apart. What if it's all falling apart so that He can take all of those pieces and put them back together in just the right way to make everything better for everyone? As we see in this story from Genesis, He does that very thing all the time. So the fact that we still doubt that or debate that just shows that our faith isn't all it should be.

Faith is trust. It's not hoping things will work out in the end; it's knowing that they will. It isn't a blind hope in good results; it's a firm belief in those good results even when the road to them looks sketchy at best. Faith isn't about making our lives easy or helping them make sense. No, faith is about our learning that the difficulties and confusions we face aren't there to make this miserable but to help us learn to trust in His ways instead of our own.

Now I'm sure that Joseph did have moments of anger and fear and craving revenge upon those who had clearly done him wrong. He was just a human after all. But the fact that he could look back and see that God orchestrated all of the things that at the time seemed completely unnecessary and unkind for something truly remarkable in the end just exudes this kind of faith that all of us should aim to have.

It's not about having a perfect life. That's just something that is both out of our control and simply out of the realm of reasonability. It's about having a perfect faith. Because while we can't control or determine what we'll face in life or how this road up ahead will twist and turn, we can always control how we respond to those ups and downs. We can determine what we gain or lose along the way. We can come out of this journey either better or bitter, and just as those two options are only separated by a single letter, so too is the line between them incredibly small.

In this life we don't get to choose what happens to us, only how it affects us. We don't get to decide what people do to us, say about us, think of us. But we do get to refuse those external influences the right and the ability and the power to pull us down into this place of anger and doubt that we all know quite well.

Maybe what you're going through right now is teaching you some lessons that you can help someone else learn later on. Perhaps your current situation is working in you a new kind of strength that someone else is going to need to lean on up ahead. Or maybe it's just a not so fun time in life with no real reason or ultimate outcome. Either way, we have to always trust that God always has a plan and a reason and a purpose for even the pains we feel and the fears we face.

He is always working things for the good of those who love Him. So do we love Him enough to trust in that? Or does our corrupted perception and our tainted perspective prevent us from the fullness of what our faith can be, should be, is meant to be?

Like I said, I'm sure that Joseph was angry or scared or at the very least unhappy about being carted off to a foreign land. But he never fell to the point of hating God for the way it worked. We shouldn't either. Maybe we won't help save people during a famine. We may not build a really big boat in preparation for a flood. We may just live our whole lives like the ordinary people we've always assumed ourselves to be in these lives filled with a fair blending of good days and not so good ones.

But even if we're only ever just these ordinary people who don't accomplish anything that's passed down to those who come after us, at least we can live with an extraordinary faith that refuses to allow us to become bitter victims of our fleeting circumstances. And who knows, maybe it's not what we manage to accomplish that matters in the end anyway.

Maybe what will always matter most is the kind of faith we display for all to see in the midst of the most boring and mundane situations in life. Because it's not what we go through that tells the world the story of who we are and what we believe.

It's how we go through it.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold