Genesis 37:8-13: a reflection

8His brothers asked him, “Will you indeed reign over us? Will you indeed have dominion over us?” They hated him all the more for his dreams and for his words. 9He dreamed yet another dream, and told it to his brothers, and said, “Behold, I have dreamed yet another dream: and behold, the sun and the moon and eleven stars bowed down to me.” 10He told it to his father and to his brothers. His father rebuked him, and said to him, “What is this dream that you have dreamed? Will I and your mother and your brothers indeed come to bow ourselves down to the earth before you?” 11His brothers envied him, but his father kept this saying in mind. 12His brothers went to feed their father’s flock in Shechem. 13Israel said to Joseph, “Aren’t your brothers feeding the flock in Shechem? Come, and I will send you to them.” He said to him, “Here I am.”

Young Joseph has dreams, God-given, it turns out, of sheaves and stars bowing down to him, pointing to a future in which he would rise above his family. He tells them, perhaps naively, and his brothers hate him for it, envying him, while his father rebukes him but, the text notes, kept the saying in mind. The dream is real, but it falls into a household that resents it.

Notice the enormous gap between the dream and its fulfillment. Those dreams of exaltation were true; Joseph really would one day rise, and his family really would bow before him. But between the dream and its coming true lay a long, dark road: betrayal by these very brothers, sold into slavery, unjustly imprisoned, years of obscurity and suffering. The promise was genuine, and the path to it ran straight through pain.

That is often the shape of God's purposes in a life. A sense of what God has for you, a calling, a hope, a promise, can be real and still take years, and hard ones, to come true, traveling a road you would never have chosen. If God has planted something in you that has not yet come to pass, and the road so far has been painful, Joseph's story is a companion. The dream was not false because the way was hard. Hold on through the long road; God's purposes are often fulfilled on the far side of suffering you could not have foreseen.

Lord, like Joseph I can sense a purpose you have given that has not yet come to pass, and the road to it can be long and painful. Help me hold on through the hard years, trusting that your promises are not false because the way is difficult, and that you fulfill them on the far side of what I cannot foresee.