When my oldest daughter was about four years old, she planted a seed. I don’t remember exactly what kind of seed it was, probably a bean of some sort. I do remember the little paper cup filled with dirt. I helped her make a little hole in the dirt, and we put the seed in and watered it and put it on a little table in front of the house.
Then she sat down to watch it grow. That makes perfect sense when you’re four. You put the seed in the dirt, give it some water. Somebody has told you that a plant is going to come out of there. So naturally, you sit down and wait for the show to begin.
Except nothing happens.
You watch for a while.
Still just dirt.
You go get some jello and ranch dressing (yes, she did that sort of thing), snack a little, come back to the paper cup.
Still dirt. No plant.
When you’re four years old, hearing that something might happen in a week or two has no meaning. Two weeks might as well be another lifetime. Time feels different when you’re four.
Come to think of it, time feels different when you’re waiting at any age.
We’ve been spending some time lately at Lincoln Park-Lynnwood United Methodist Church with the extended story of Joseph in Genesis, and I realized there’s something about the chronology of his story that’s easy to miss.
Joseph is seventeen years old when the story begins. He has those famous dreams about his brothers’ sheaves of grain bowing down to his, and then about the sun and moon and eleven stars bowing down to him. We know where that’s going because we know the rest of the story.
Joseph’s brothers eventually come to Egypt during a famine. They stand before Joseph, who has become one of the most powerful men in Egypt, and they bow before him without even recognizing him.
There it is. The dream came true. Except that skips over something important.
For one thing, the Genesis narrator never actually tells us that seventeen-year-old Joseph understood what those dreams meant.
His brothers certainly thought they knew. “Are you really going to rule over us?” they demanded. His father Jacob heard about the second dream and reached much the same conclusion. “Will your mother and I and your brothers really come and bow down on the ground in front of you?”
Maybe that was what Joseph thought too, but the Bible doesn’t say.
We know what the dreams meant because we read Genesis from the comfortable position of people who can turn the page.
Joseph couldn’t.
He had a dream. Then his brothers threw him into a pit. And I doubt he was sitting at the bottom of that pit thinking, “Ah. Yes. I see how this fits.”
He was sold into slavery and taken to Egypt. He served in Potiphar’s household. Things went reasonably well for a while, considering that he was still an enslaved person far from home.
Then he was falsely accused and thrown into prison. Things went reasonably well there too, considering that he was still in prison.
Eventually he interpreted dreams for two of Pharaoh’s servants. One of them, the cupbearer, was restored to his position, exactly as Joseph had predicted.
Joseph asked him to remember him. The cupbearer forgot. And Genesis says two full years passed.
Two years.
That sounds like a long time to me. It must have sounded like forever to Joseph.
But even those two years were only part of the waiting.
Do the math on this. Joseph was seventeen years old when his brothers sold him. Genesis tells us that he was thirty when Pharaoh finally elevated him to authority over Egypt.
Let’s see, thirty minus seventeen. Borrow the ten, carry the something or other...
Thirteen years.
Thirteen years between the dreams and that extraordinary change in his circumstances.
And even then, the dreams still hadn’t come true. Seven more years passed while Egypt enjoyed abundance. Then the famine began. Two more years passed.
By the time Joseph finally revealed himself to his brothers, he was about thirty-nine years old.
Seventeen when he dreamed.
About thirty-nine when he could finally look around and perhaps begin to understand what those dreams had been pointing toward.
Twenty-two years.
When we read Genesis, we can cover those years in a few minutes. Joseph had to live them one day at a time.
That makes me wonder what Joseph thought during all those years.
Did he remember those dreams while he was working in Potiphar’s house? Did he think about them in prison? Did he eventually decide they had just been strange dreams from an adolescent who had perhaps thought a little too highly of himself? Did he wonder whether God had forgotten him?
We don’t know. We know he could interpret other people’s dreams. But Genesis doesn’t tell us what Joseph was thinking, just what he was doing.
Maybe that’s part of what makes the story useful for people like you and me. Most of the time, we don’t know either. We don’t get to turn the page and see what happens five chapters from now. We live inside the chapter we’re in.
I’m acutely aware of that as an author. I may know what the outline says for the final pages, and I may even have written it already. (Open secret: authors don’t have to write in the order in which the final publication appears. J. K. Rowling reportedly knew how the Harry Potter series would end before she ever started writing the first one.) But the character on page 32 doesn’t know that yet.
Sometimes we have hopes. We may have a sense that God may be leading us somewhere. Sometimes we pray for something for a very long time.
And sometimes all we can see is dirt in a paper cup. Nothing seems to be happening.
But there’s a difference between nothing happening and nothing we can see happening.
That seed my daughter planted didn’t sit underneath the soil doing nothing.
The seed coat was softening. It was absorbing water. It had begun processes that a four-year-old sitting beside a paper cup couldn’t possibly see.
The surface looked exactly the same, but underneath, something was changing.
Now, I want to be careful with that image.
As we said before, I don’t think Joseph’s story means that God caused everything that happened to Joseph because it was all necessary for some grand plan.
His brothers did something terrible to him. He was enslaved. He was falsely accused. He was imprisoned.
I don’t need to make God responsible for those things in order to believe God was at work in the middle of them, using the decisions people freely made.
The remarkable thing about Joseph’s story is that none of those things stopped God. Not the pit or Potiphar’s house or the prison. Even being forgotten by Pharaoh’s cupbearer didn’t mean Joseph had been forgotten by God.
God was still present in a story Joseph could not yet understand. Maybe that’s where this story meets us.
I wish I could tell you that if you wait long enough, eventually everything will make sense. But I can’t. Some things in my own life still don’t make sense to me. I suspect you have some of those too.
Not every story gives us a Genesis 45 moment when we can suddenly look backward and say, “Oh. Now I understand what all of that meant.”
Faith doesn’t require us to pretend otherwise. After all, as we noted some weeks ago, I doubt that Leah ever had an inkling that one of the children she had trying to gain the love of her husband would ultimately lead to the kings of Israel and the savior of the world.
But Joseph’s story does remind me that what I can see right now isn’t necessarily everything that is happening right now. God may be at work in ways I cannot see. And God is certainly not obligated to work according to my timetable or to explain what is going on.
That’s frustrating, because I rather like my timetable.
I would prefer prayers answered promptly, problems resolved efficiently, directions clearly marked, and spiritual growth delivered with tracking information, ideally accessed via a convenient QR code.
God seems remarkably uninterested in that arrangement.
Maybe the question, then, isn’t, “When is God going to do something?”
Maybe a better question is, “What is mine to do while I’m here?”
Joseph couldn’t make Pharaoh have his dream sooner. He couldn’t make the cupbearer remember him. He couldn’t make the famine arrive. He couldn’t make his brothers show up in Egypt. He couldn’t even get out of that pit. All he could ever do was be faithful in whatever place he happened to be.
Maybe that’s enough for us too, especially since that’s all we have any control over. Do what we can do today. Love the people in front of us.
Keep praying. Keep showing up. Water the seed. Give it some light. And resist the temptation to dig it up every fifteen minutes to see whether God is doing anything.
Sometimes the surface still looks like dirt, but underneath, something may already be growing.
Father, help us trust you when we can’t see what you’re doing. Give us patience with your timing and wisdom to recognize what is ours to do today. When all we can see is dirt, give us enough faith to keep tending the soil. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
You probably have experience with this. Share with your community about it.
