Today’s passage is Genesis 47:37-57. Pharaoh makes Joseph his second in command and puts him in charge of gathering the surplus grain of the good harvest years. He gives him a new name and the daughter of a chief priest as his wife by whom he has Manasseh and Ephraim. The famine comes but the Egyptians have surplus grain to buy.
Do you try to forget your time of hardship?
How have you made good use of your time of surplus?
Do you turn to your own desires and neglect God?
Because of Wooridle worship, mokjang and QT, my sins are ever before me.
At first--and sometimes still!--I wished this were not the case because I would like to think of myself as a basically good guy, who occasionally makes mistakes.
The truth, of course, is completely contrary. I am sinful through and through.
The truth about myself is one of God’s great gifts to me, and I am grateful to Wooridle, my spiritual community, for delivering this gift day after day, week after week, month after month and year after year.
Without this daily reminder of my sinfulness, I would neglect God, my Savior, who died on the cross to pay for my sins and then rose from the dead to guarantee my salvation through my faith in him.
Without the daily reminder of my sinfulness, I would lose sight of the big picture of my life, which is my salvation and an eternal, joyful relationship with God.
I would lose sight of the truth that God has a purpose for me to fulfill that I will only see the whole of at the end of my life.
During my years in Canada when I had a good job, I did not use my time and money well. After teaching all day in high school, I then taught a couple of nights a week at university as well as taking courses in linguistics and Latin.
Despite a job I really liked as English department head, I still pursued a university position instead. My wife must have been very lonely because of the long hours I was away.
It may have been the time she turned to alcohol. I don’t know because I didn’t pay attention, I was too busy chasing a fantasy.
In addition to my fourteen and sixteen hour days, I did not watch my money.
I had no plan for what God had given me because I worshipped my daydream of university and writing success, which I was convinced would take care of all my needs when it happened.
I wasn’t living in the reality of my circumstances.
The result was ongoing debt and frustration. I should have been doing well, but I was doing very poorly because I didn’t know what I was doing.
Because God was not a meaningful part of my everyday reality, I didn’t look to him for direction. I just complained that I didn’t have enough.
Now, thirty years later, after a time of famine, I once more find myself in a time of plenty with a good job.
The difference is that now I look to God far more often and regularly than before.
Despite that, it has still taken me many years to wake up from a habitually reckless life devoid of long term plans, seven-year plans.
Joseph’s story can be my story, at least in part.
I am old and likely have only a few more years of work in my school.
Due to less than thoughtful actions in the last few months about where to live, I have at last reflected on what God is calling me to do with my circumstances.
Although I had a clear idea about what he wants me to do in my school, I did not have any idea about what his mind was for me and my wife outside of my work and our worship because I did not earnestly seek to know.
Life continued to be unplanned and undirected, our money partly saved and partly going into health and life insurance policies that were cancelled and changed every year according to the news of the day.
The result of our sincere prayer for God’s mind was connected to our worship.
We needed a place to host mokjang not just now but after my school work stops.
That meant buying an apartment.
We had three points that the apartment had to meet: close to our work, which is also close to church; big enough to host a mokjang whose members had children; priced at what we could pay off in seven years.
Once conceived, God guided us quickly and unerringly to what we needed, which we discussed with our spiritual community to be sure.
Application: to assess what the Lord has given me in time, money and talents and earnestly seek his will in applying them in a plan.
Lord, let me not be lost in fantasy but always to seek your mind with the resources you have given me. Let me not forget that good times are followed by hard ones. Help me be a good steward of what you have trusted me with.
