By Linda Evans Shepherd
Have you ever bruised your heart by tripping on a relationship?
Maybe your best friend stopped speaking to you, your boss spewed his bad attitude all over your work, or the kids tried to wake you to ‘woke,’ and because you said, ‘no,’ in love, you must deal with the fallout. These things shouldn’t happen, not when you have God’s Holy Spirit inside of you, right?
Yet, these are the kinds of relationship difficulties that everyone must manage. But our secret power is that we can trust God through it all.
Consider young Joseph, from the Book of Genesis. I’ve sometimes wondered if he was too naïve to understand his brothers’ jealousy. Why else did he flaunt his God-dreams that they would one day bow down to him, their little, noaccount half-brother? Joseph got his wake-up call when his brothers threatened to kill him, threw him in a pit, and sold him to slavers. Even through the resulting hardships, Joseph trusted God. Even when he became a household slave and his mistress falsely accused him of a sex crime, and even when he was thrown into jail with no hope of release. He trusted God and tried to make the best of each difficulty. He worked hard and befriended those who came into his life, including the Pharaoh’s chief butler who also spent a few evenings in Joseph’s jail. It was the butler who eventually put in a good word to the Pharaoh on Joseph’s behalf, resulting in Joseph interpreting the Pharaoh’s dream about a coming famine. This resulted in Joseph becoming second in command to the Pharaoh so he could create a stockpile of food for the coming days of trouble.
When the day came that Joseph’s hungry brothers came to Egypt to buy grain, they did not know that this young ruler they bowed before was their own brother.
And Joseph didn’t rush to lop off their heads or even greet them with open arms.
Instead, he put them to a test to see if they had finally become trustworthy.
But when Ruben, the oldest brother, offered to sacrifice himself to jail to save his father’s youngest son from such a fate, Joseph finally revealed his identity. Later, when Joseph spoke of the long-ago betrayal of his brothers, he said, “What the enemy meant for evil, God meant for good, for the saving of many lives.” As you read this issue of Leading Hearts I hope you are inspired to love others and trust God, even in your most difficult relationships.
For Joseph, the result was a miracle that even Joseph-the-dreamer couldn’t have ever imagined.