Still Here: Finding Your Purpose in the Pit

Picture this: you're standing in front of the person who threw you away. Sold you. Watched you get carried off and then went home and lied about it. Years later, they're standing in front of you again — except now you have all the power. You could do anything you want to them. What would you do?

That's exactly where Joseph is in Genesis 50. His brothers are standing in front of him, terrified, because their father Jacob has just died and they're convinced Joseph has been waiting all this time for the right moment to get even. So they beg for mercy. And Joseph does something you don't see coming — he weeps. Then he tells them not to be afraid, because even though what they did to him was genuinely evil, God had been writing a completely different story underneath it the whole time.

If you don't know the backstory: Joseph was the favorite son, the kid with the flashy coat, the one who had big dreams about his family bowing down to him someday. His brothers hated him for it, so they threw him in a pit, sold him into slavery, and told their dad he'd been killed by a wild animal. What followed for Joseph was two decades of one raw deal after another — falsely accused, forgotten in prison, overlooked again and again. And yet somehow, by the time we get to Genesis 50, he's the second most powerful man in Egypt, and the very brothers who tried to destroy him are the ones he's about to save from starvation.

Here's what stood out to me reading this again this week. Joseph never pretends the bad stuff wasn't bad. He doesn't say, 'Oh, it's fine, don't worry about it.' He looks his brothers in the eye and says, 'You meant this for evil.' Full stop. No sugarcoating. But then he adds one more sentence that changes everything: 'God meant it for good.' Two plans, running at the same time, in the same events. One from people who wanted to hurt him. One from God, who wanted to save an entire nation through him.

That's the whole reason this story is in the Bible. Not to teach you that bad things are secretly good, but to show you that God doesn't need your circumstances to cooperate with him in order to work. He can take the exact same events other people meant to destroy you and use them to build something you couldn't have built any other way. If you're in a season right now where you're trying to figure out whose plan is actually running your life — the one who hurt you, or the One who made you — this week is for you.