Written by Dawn Rutan
The following is drawn from the Family Camp studies on the life of Joseph based on Max Lucado’s book You’ll Get Through This. Max says:
You’ll get through this. It won’t be painless. It won’t be quick. But God will use this mess for good. In the meantime, don’t be foolish or naïve. But don’t despair either. With God’s help, you will get through this.”
The difficulty is that we don’t know how long “through” is going to last—days, months, years, or a lifetime. It is that uncertainty that is the hardest to bear. As someone said, if I know this will be over next month, then I know I can endure it. If I don’t know when (or if) this will end, I imagine the worst and feel unable to keep pressing on.
In the life of Joseph, he had no idea how long he would spend in the pit, in Potiphar’s house, in prison, or in the palace. The pit didn’t last long, but being sold into slavery was a different kind of pit. And prison could have been a much shorter stay if Potiphar had gotten the truth out of his wife, or if the cupbearer had remembered his promise. But through it all, Joseph remained faithful to God.
We don’t know if Joseph had access to any kind of Scripture, and his family wouldn’t be praying for him if they thought he was dead. So most of his life it seems he was alone with his memories of the stories his father had likely told him about Noah, Abraham, and others, and he had his own prayers and the dreams God had given him. So he endured by faith until God brought him through the other side.
Unlike Joseph, we do have a couple avenues to find strength to endure and to trust in God: Scripture and community. We have to decide to believe that the promises of the Word are true, even if they don’t seem true at this moment: God is in control; God is good; God is working all things for my good and His glory; God knows and understands exactly how we feel. By faith we take Him at His word and cling to what we know. And in order to do that, we need the loving support and the graceful reminders provided by the Body of Christ. We need to be reminded of the truth in preaching and teaching. We need the encouragement and love of true fellowship. We need to know that others have been through the same difficulties and have survived with their faith intact. Community can provide more specifically in the forms of prayer, comfort, and material needs as well.
I don’t know that I would have the endurance of Joseph. Thankfully I haven’t had the same kinds of trials, though that doesn’t really matter. God has His own way of turning evil into good for His own purposes. And He’s given us His Word and His people to carry us through.
“Therefore since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us” (Hebrews 12:1).
