Joseph: A Story of Reconciliation and Emotional HealingНамуна

Where Joseph’s test of his brothers reveals whether they have really changed, the death of their father reveals whether Joseph has really forgiven them.

As Jacob, his sons, and their families approach Egypt with all their livestock and possessions, Joseph runs out to meet his dad. The two hug one another and weep together for a long time. Reading this in Scripture, it’s cinematic. It’s the stuff feel-good movies are made of. But this is real, raw, and unscripted. After all these years believing they’d never see the other again, they are finally brought back together.

Jacob says to Joseph, “Now I am ready to die, since I have seen your face again and know you are still alive.”

Surprisingly, Jacob doesn’t die as quickly as he expects. He actually lives 17 years after his arrival in Egypt, dying peacefully of natural causes at the age of 147.

After burying their father in Canaan with his ancestors, Joseph’s brothers grow fearful. They suspect that Joseph only treated them kindly as long as their father was with them. Now that Jacob is dead, they’re sure Joseph will punish them for the wrong they committed against him. So, they devise a preemptive strategy and plead with Joseph for their lives, offering to become his slaves if he’ll spare them.

Joseph responds once again with kindness, assuring them that he has forgiven them, that he will care for them and their children, and that God has used even their evil-intended actions for good.

The story of Joseph has a beautiful ending. Sometimes, though, our own circumstances don’t resolve as beautifully. The truth about our own stories is that we don’t know how they’ll end.

For many of us, though, our deepest fear isn’t that our stories will end poorly, but that our lives aren’t stories at all—that there’s no living, loving, reconciling, restoring God who’s writing and making sense and meaning out of them.

The story of Joseph has its fair share of messy situations, ups and downs, as any compelling story does. The satisfying ending of this story doesn’t negate all the years it takes to get there or the difficulties in the years that come after.

What’s most compelling and attractive about this story for some—and maybe irritatingly simplistic for others—isn’t Joseph’s perseverance or Judah’s change of heart. It’s that there is a larger plan at play. A plan that belongs to God, an author with truly kind intentions whose pen determines the course of real people’s lives.

For many of us, it’ll take a lifetime to fully believe we’re part of a bigger story, surrender in love to its author, and accept the years of pain he may write into our pages. Our reward comes when the last page is written and we, with fresh assurance, see that we were right to believe—that the author saw us not as mere characters, but as his own kids. And that he never had favorites.

Each of our stories is marked by deeply emotional experiences: suffering and grief, joy and celebration, and everything in between. Who we become as a result of these experiences makes all the difference.

When we lean on the Lord—in suffering, in injustice, in grief, in confession and repentance, in forgiveness, in faithful stewardship of our gifts, in every opportunity to do good—our hearts will be strengthened for the road ahead, and we will one day look back on our stories to see the goodness of God woven into every twist, turn, and beautiful ending.

REFLECT

Where in your own unfinished story do you see the goodness of God right now? How can you lean on the Lord to care for the health of your heart and mind through the ups and downs of life?