As New Year approaches, people often reflect on the events of the past twelve months. As it is generally a good thing to stop and take stock of our lives, it is important to do it in the right perspective. I say this because I know of a couple of siblings who were both raised in the same way, same household and same parents, same situation, and while one has a generally positive outlook on his childhood, the other sees nothing but gloom. Indeed, much has to do with the perspectival lens we use as we reflect.
For two weeks I have been reading the story of Joseph in the Bible. The life of this renowned patriarch seems to have followed Murphy’s Law --, ‘if anything can go wrong, it will!’ His father’s favor earned him the hatred and contempt of his eleven brothers who eventually sold him to be a slave in a foreign country. After several ups and downs in his new host country, Joseph ended up as the viceroy of the whole Egyptian Empire of the day. Later, when Joseph was in the position to take revenge on his brothers, he did not. He actually made sure that they knew he was not out for revenge. What made him react like this? Was it a religious sense of piety? Love for his brothers? Did he blame his father who seemed to be responsible for the situation? The text tells us of something even greater that seems to be good advice for most of us. When his brothers feared due retribution for their evil deeds, Joseph comforted them and told them not to fear. He said, “God sent me before you to preserve life...it was not you who sent me here, but God. …” (Gen 45:5,8) Joseph did not blame his siblings, his parents, the government, his environment, his surrounding for all that happened to him. He utterly trusted that not only God let it happen to him, but that he let it happen to him for a good reason. As we reflect on last year’s events we may find lots of good things, but also lots of bad things. We may EVEN find ourselves at the end of a mostly taxing and trying year. To make sense of it all, it is important to look at it all not as cosmic randomness but as a mysterious plan for an ultimate good. Unlike Joseph, our troubles will probably not bring us to the ‘courts of Pharaoh’. We might even never see a positive outcome for them but whether we understand it or not, or whether we see it before the end of our days or not, we can comfort ourselves with the assurance that it was not random people and events who created these situations, but God who let them happen for an ultimate good purpose, somehow, ‘in order to preserve life’.
1 Comment
Jerry Giger
12/30/2016 07:50:26 pm
Thank you
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