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Exchanged Glory V: God Meant it for Good
<page 17>The butterfly had flapped its wings, and a storm was set in motion. …It wasn’t a question of whether I would develop psychological problems; it was a question of what they would be and when they would show up.
A man met him (Joseph) as he was wandering through the fields and asked him, "What are you looking for?" "I'm trying to find my brothers. Do you have any idea where they are grazing their flocks?" The man said, "They've left here, but I overheard them say, 'Let's go to Dothan.'" So Joseph took off, tracked his brothers down, and found them in Dothan.
(Genesis 37:15-17, The Message)
Why does the Bible tell us this seemingly insignificant little story of Joseph meeting a man in the fields? Who cares if Joseph was lost? The important thing is that when he found his brothers in Dothan, they sold him into slavery, and this started the amazing chain of events that helped him to save many lives.
I believe the story of the man in the fields is included because it shows us how easily Joseph could have been spared from his troubles. If he hadn’t run into the man, he wouldn’t have found his brothers, they wouldn’t have sold him into slavery, and years of pain could have been avoided.
I can imagine Joseph looking back on this seemingly chance meeting while enduring slavery and imprisonment. It was a prime candidate for triggering the “if only” thoughts that invade a person’s mind when they are unhappy – “If only I hadn’t met that man….”
Joseph obviously decided that there was a purpose to this event. Since he was the only eye witness, it is likely that he was the one who passed it down to us. It contained an important message for his descendants, so he made sure they knew about it.
That message is that even in details that appear to be random, God is in charge. The Almighty looked at the many scenarios of what could have happened to Joseph, and He decided that allowing him to suffer and rise to power in Egypt was the best way to show His love.
We aren’t told what the other scenarios might have been, but we can speculate about some of them. For example, suppose God had left Joseph to wander helplessly in the fields. Though that would have spared him from his brothers, it wouldn’t have ended their growing hatred of him (Genesis 37:4). Some of them were already ready to kill him (Genesis 37:20). It is possible that had God waited another day they would have acted on their rage. Slavery in Egypt might have been the best way to spare Joseph’s life.
Another scenario might have called for God to supernaturally stop Joseph’s brothers, but there would have been consequences to that also. For example, a display of power might only have intensified their hatred. In time, the only way to protect Joseph might have been to bring devastating judgment on the brothers. That would have interfered with God’s desire to bless the nation of Israel, and it also would have gone against Joseph’s desires. He didn’t want to damage his brothers; he wanted to help them.
<page 18>There was a “man in the fields” in my life story. I will call her Mrs. Gerald (not her real name). She was my teacher for both fourth and fifth grade. Everyone should have a teacher like Mrs. Gerald; she clearly loved me. I could sense her cheering me on, urging me to do well, supporting me not only in my class-work but also as a person.
By the time I finished my two years with her, I was ready for advanced placement in the sixth grade. Mrs. Gerald recognized my gifts and patiently brought them to the surface. Her input set the stage for the rest of my academic and business success.
She also perceived my weaknesses. When I was in my twenties, my mother gave me the evaluations Mrs. Gerald had written about me. She described me as being so emotional that she was sometimes afraid I wouldn’t be able to handle the situations that came up in her classroom. Then I would always somehow pull myself together and accomplish what needed to be done. When my wife read that she said, “Boy did she have you pegged.”
Another observation Mrs. Gerald made was extremely telling. She privately tutored me in spelling, and she noticed that I had no trouble learning the rules of spelling. I could easily pick up principles like “’i’ before ‘e’ except after ‘c’ or when said like ‘ay’ as in neighbor and weigh.” What tripped me up were words like “weird” and “seize” which didn’t obey the rules.
What was true in spelling has been true in many areas of my life: rules and principles aren’t generally a problem for me; exceptions are. Mrs. Gerald’s observation could almost be used as a subtitle for my life – “A man who struggled with the exceptions.”
This weakness especially showed when I had to deal with sin. I enjoyed learning how people should live, but the reality of how they instead choose to live was hard on me. My previous book, Exchanged Glory IV: A Time for Every Purpose, is basically a long description of God helping me to come to grips with this weakness. It describes the difficult path by which I learned to handle sin and death in the world, the exceptions to God’s rule of goodness in life.
I didn’t know what a Christian was when I was in Mrs. Gerald’s class, but something in me responded to her faith. I never remember her saying the name of Jesus, but the Holy Spirit worked through her and touched my heart anyway. …And surprisingly, it was Mrs. Gerald’s faith, love, and wisdom that turned her into my “man in the fields.” By presenting a godly example she helped me to see an exception in my parents’ lives, and this sent the kid who was good with rules and bad with exceptions in the direction of the greatest slavery and imprisonment of his life.
One day in class, Mrs. Gerald talked to us about the health risks of smoking. I don’t remember what she said, but I do remember that I realized, for the first time, that my mother’s smoking might kill her.
I had previously disliked her annoying habit. The smoke burned in my respiratory passages and aggravated my bronchial infections. It filled our house with irritation and stench. I inhaled it when I went to bed and when I woke up. It was with me when we traveled in the car and when we ate our meals. It was ever-present in our family life.
It wasn’t until years later that I learned about the health risks of secondhand smoke, but I knew from experience that it affected my breathing. I was already showing signs of asthma – a disease <page 19>which I was later in life forced to control with medication. The physical discomfort led me to object to my mother’s habit.
On the day I heard that smoking could kill people, however, I realized that there was something more at stake than my discomfort. My mother’s life was threatened, and I felt I had to do what I could to rescue her. Perhaps for the first time in my life, I made a moral decision independently from my parents. I concluded that smoking was wrong and that I should do something about it.
When I got home from school, I told my mother what I had learned and asked her to quit. I was sure that once she knew about the dangers she would do the right thing. After all, my parents were (in my eyes) shining examples of wisdom and virtue. They had taught me for years to make good decisions and care for people, including myself. Certainly, I reasoned, the only explanation for her actions was that she didn’t know any better.
I was shocked by her response. She told me she already knew the risks, but she couldn’t quit. She was addicted.
A little of my mother’s history is helpful at this point. Her parents divorced when she was five years old over the issue of my grandfather’s adultery. My grandmother was forced to work during the Great Depression, so my mother was placed in a Catholic boarding school. At the school, she was so impressed with the faith of the nuns that she decided to become a nun herself.
My grandmother wouldn’t consider that possibility, however. It was unacceptable for my mother to become a Catholic to start with, and there was no way she was going to let her impressionable young daughter give up her future family simply because her teachers had taken a vow of celibacy.
Though I am glad that my mother didn’t become a nun (I wouldn’t be here if she had), my grandmother’s decision left my mother in a spiritual no man’s land. She had to spend her formative years in a school in which she watched her friends and mentors practice their Catholicism, but she couldn’t join them. I don’t know that anyone directly told her she was headed for hell for this, but I imagine she feared that possibility. She didn’t have a Protestant version of Christianity to fall back on.
My mother sought refuge in making up her own religion. It was so personal to her that when I tried to speak to her about it, she could barely describe it. She had no concept of justifying it with evidence; it was a deep-seated mixture of feelings and cultural norms.
At its heart was the belief that there was a God who required her to earn her way to heaven. She did that by holding to the morals and standards of her generation, which were to work hard, be kind, and allow yourself the freedom to indulge in life’s little pleasures.
I suspect that when my mother saw my emerging moral development, she remembered her own disappointing childhood. She wanted to encourage me in ways her mother had failed to encourage her, so a short time after my request for her to quit smoking, she rewarded my concern by doing so.
She waited five days to tell me about it, probably to make sure she would stick with it, and then she let me in on her secret. I reacted with excitement and told her how happy I was.
<page 20>My father was in the next room, and I hurried in to tell him. I expected him to react as I did – to congratulate and encourage my mother. Instead, he told her that he had noticed how cranky she had been for the past few days. He thought she should start smoking again for the sake of our family.
I had a friend visiting at the time, and my father gave him money to go home and buy some cigarettes from his parents. My friend cooperated, and within fifteen minutes my mother was smoking again.
I was shocked and bewildered by what had just happened. I couldn’t believe what my parents were doing.
Why did my father make this reckless decision? I didn’t know it at the time, but he had made his own search for faith many years earlier. As a young man, he had studied religion and philosophy, and he chose to embrace the intellectual climate of his time, which rejected organized religion as superstition.
For him, life was about being successful and enjoying himself. No one could really know the truth, so society created its own rules. Since American society in the 1960s didn’t condemn smoking, my father had no intention of allowing his son to bring stuffy overly-health-conscious rules into his house. They might disrupt his pleasant wife and the atmosphere she provided. He put a quick end to my “stop smoking” crusade.
I was so disoriented by my father’s obviously wrong choice that I was too stunned to speak. My life had been going so well. Mrs. Gerald had been a marvelous example. I had responded with an awakened conscience and had tried to help my mother. She had responded by making a wise yet difficult choice, and everything was proceeding the way I thought it should.
Then my father turned my world upside down. He opposed what I knew to be right and replaced my joy with the horror of a cancer-based death sentence for my mother.
The young boy who was so emotional he had trouble handling the situations in Mrs. Gerald’s classroom, the one who was good with rules and bad with exceptions, was now faced with an exception unlike any he had seen before. I needed to come to grips with the belief that my parents had chosen to ignore my concern for my mother’s health.
There was no hope of burying this issue until I was ready to handle it. I was going to be constantly reminded of it by the ever-present stench of death that hung in the air of our house. My mother smoked in front of me every day.
My heart went into disarray. The butterfly had flapped its wings, and a storm was set in motion. Without some quick intervention, something within me was going to break. It wasn’t a question of whether I would develop psychological problems; it was a question of what they would be and when they would show up.
I realize it is a stretch to compare my parent’s actions with those of Joseph’s brothers. My parents weren’t trying to hurt me; they were just indulging in their culture. But that didn’t change the fact that I was extremely hurt – and, like Joseph, I had to learn how to handle my pain.
I also know that it is a stretch to compare the slavery that resulted in my life to the slavery that resulted in Joseph’s. Joseph was forced to serve a human master. I voluntarily chose to numb my <page 21>emotions with sin. This brings us to an important question: Is it acceptable for us to come to the conclusion, “I meant it for evil, but God meant it for good?”
Joseph gives us the answer. He said to his brothers, “don't feel badly; don't blame yourselves for selling me. God was behind it” (Genesis 45:5, The Message). He is clearly telling them to view the sins they committed in the light of God’s plan. He wanted each of them to say: “I meant it for evil, but God meant it for good.” He encouraged them to look beyond their sin to heaven’s strategy.
The correct way to see the world is through the lens of the Savior’s mercy and power rather than through shame. Joseph’s words say in effect, “You have not destroyed goodness in the earth by your actions. You don’t have enough power to do that. Don’t be overcome by a sense of loss and blame. Though you need to repent, you also need to realize that even your worst actions can be turned to blessings.”
I know that this sort of statement is startling. It is hard to apply it to ourselves, because we know that we (or someone else) might use it as an excuse for sin. But we need to get beyond the fact that people are capable of twisting truth to justify their actions.
God’s perspective is the only sane one, even if people may misuse it. While He doesn’t deemphasize our responsibility, He does emphasize the fact that He runs the universe. He isn’t overcome by our sins. His mercy is more than able to take our worst and fit it into a beautiful future.
There is another important question we must consider before we fully apply Joseph’s words to ourselves, however. Was Joseph speaking about all evil, or only his brothers’? In other words, we know that God brought good from the brothers’ sins in this one instance, but can we automatically conclude from this that He brings good from all sins? Joseph may not have been speaking a general principle that applies to all situations.
What do the Scriptures say?
And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose.
The above verse gives us the general principle behind Joseph’s words. Everything that happens on this planet (including any instance of sin) works together for good for a specific group of people, those who love God and are called according to His purpose.
This isn’t an exclusive group; it is open for all who accept Christ through faith. We can all be like Joseph and his brothers; everything can work together for our good. God continues to bring the same sort of mercy today that He did in ancient times. In fact, because of what Jesus has done, He brings even greater mercy.
No one, no matter how much pain they may have caused, can stop His love or derail His plan. Once anyone repents and receives His grace, they start receiving His “evil-reworking” benefits. No child of God needs to live under a weight of blame, regret, or hopelessness.
Though it may take us many years to grow into the wisdom that allows us to feel this freedom, it is God’s goal for all of us. Our job is to humbly seek Him and submit to Him. We must follow Joseph’s example and find His plan in the middle of the mess. He will give us His answers to the worst wounds inflicted on us or by us, whether intentionally or unintentionally – by you, by me, or by others …He will work everything for good!
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