If you take a moment to reminisce over your life, can you see how God has been at work? Have you ever asked him for something and not gotten it? And then sometime later you realize God gave you something better instead? When someone asks if I have seen God at work in my life this is the first thing that comes to my mind.
During my first year of college, I applied to work at a Cannon Beach Christian Conference Center for the summer, where I would get to teach kids about Jesus, live on the beach and work with my cousin. I wanted that job so bad, and I was devastated when I didn’t get it. I still don’t really understand why I didn’t get it; I was perfectly qualified! It was basically like helping at VBS but all summer, I could totally do that. (Clearly, I still have some resentment to work through.) I remember praying and asking God why I didn’t get that job, teaching kids about Jesus is a good thing. Why would he withhold a good thing? Miraculously I got my answer only two weeks later. A friend of mine worked at Masterworks, which is a marketing agency that works with non-profit organizations to create doner campaigns. The Production Art department needed an intern. Not only did I get college credit for that internship, but I became a better designer and learned how to use art programs I use every day at PCC.
During that internship I learned how to use Adobe Indesign. It’s the program I use to put the workbooks together. Every time I start working on a new one, I think about that internship and how it came about. I’m currently working on the fall workbook called God Meant It for Good: A study of the Life of Joseph. We will be working through Genesis 37-50, and I highly encourage you to take some time to ready though those chapters. Joseph’s life is pretty incredible.
Unlike my story, Joseph had to suffer through a lot of hard things before he saw the good God was doing. Joseph is thrown in a pit and sold into slavery by his brothers. His dad thinks he is dead. For years he serves a master in a foreign country until he is wrongfully accused of sextual abuse and thrown in jail. But God had a plan. He used Joseph to save his family and the nation of Egypt from a famine. Joseph saw how God has used all the pain and suffering to bring him to a place and position where he could save thousands of people’s lives.
At the end of the story, when Joseph’s father, Jacob, dies of old age his brother get nervous Joseph is going to get back at them for what they did. They beg him to forgive them, and this is Joseph’s response:
Genesis 50.19-21 But Joseph said to them, “Do not fear, for am I in the place of God? As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today. So do not fear; I will provide for you and your little ones.” Thus he comforted them and spoke kindly to them.
There is a whole lesson of forgiveness here too. But what I want us to focus and reflect on is this: even though it can be hard to see God in our difficult, frustrating, disappointing, painful situations he is there, and he is working them for good. If you trust in him, he will never stop providing for you.
