Genesis 41:9-13: in context

Two years earlier, Joseph had interpreted a dream for Pharaoh's cupbearer in prison, correctly, and had asked one small thing in return: remember me when it goes well with you. And the cupbearer had walked free and forgotten him completely. Now Pharaoh is tormented by dreams no one in Egypt can explain, and at last the cupbearer's memory stirs. I remember my faults today, he says, and tells Pharaoh about the young Hebrew in the prison who read his dream and the baker's, and how everything happened exactly as he said.

He remembers at the worst possible moment for his own comfort and the best possible moment for God's plan. Had the cupbearer remembered Joseph two years earlier, out of gratitude, the most that would have happened is that a wronged prisoner might have been quietly released. Instead, forgotten until now, Joseph is summoned the very day Egypt's future hangs on a dream, and he walks out of prison not into obscurity but into the second-highest office in the land, positioned to save whole nations from famine, his own family among them. The forgetting that felt like abandonment turns out to have been the timing. What looked like two wasted years in a dungeon was Joseph being held in place until the one hour when his gift would do the most good.

Joseph was forgotten for two years, and then remembered on exactly the day it mattered most. Is there a delay in my life that feels like being forgotten, that might in fact be right timing I cannot yet see?