In the summer of 1978, I worked as a security guard at the old Opryland theme park in Nashville. I was very young, as I look back on it. I probably thought I knew considerably more about life than I actually did.
Most of my work was around the theme park itself, but occasionally I worked security before, during, or after a performance of the Grand Ole Opry, which meant I occasionally found myself around some pretty famous people.
One of them was Dolly Parton.
Now, I wish I could tell you that Dolly and I sat backstage and had a long conversation about life and faith and the meaning of the universe. We didn’t. As far as I remember, I never actually spoke with her.
But I watched her, along with the other stars of the Opry, up-and-comers and old-timers alike. I noticed something about Dolly (as everyone around here calls her) that has stuck with me for almost fifty years. After the show ended, she would change out of the gaudy stage clothes, put on a pair of jeans, and help the crew strike the set.
That impressed me. Not everybody did that. Some of the other performers wanted you to know they were stars, and they expected to be treated accordingly.
But Dolly? Dolly was just Dolly.
Of course, even then she was already famous. Over the years, she became much more famous. She made movies, built businesses, opened Dollywood. She became known all over the world, as I’m sure you know.
But somehow, from everything I could see from my little town one county over from her home, she managed to keep growing without losing touch with where she came from. That’s a difficult combination.
We mourned Dolly’s death in church this past Sunday, and I meant to tell that story. Then I got caught up in everything else and forgot.
So I’m telling it now. Because I’ve been thinking about something else lately that connects with it. I’ve been thinking about Joseph. We’ve spent several weeks with Joseph in Genesis, and I am fascinated by a lot in his story that I hadn’t noticed before.
For instance, we know that when Joseph’s brothers finally encounter him again in Egypt, they don’t recognize him. But really, why would they?
The last time they saw Joseph, he was seventeen years old. He was their irritating little brother. Dad’s favorite. The kid with the special robe and the big dreams who seemed entirely too happy to tell everybody about them. Then they sold him. Around 20 years pass, and they have no idea what happened to him, only it was different from what Dad thought it was.
The next time they saw him, Joseph wasn’t seventeen anymore. He wasn’t a slave, which is what they had sold him to be. He was a powerful Egyptian official. Pharaoh had given him an Egyptian name. Joseph had an Egyptian wife and children. He dressed like an Egyptian official. He spoke to his brothers through an interpreter.
As far as they knew, the man standing in front of them was an Egyptian. Of course they didn’t recognize him.
And I’ve been wondering whether there’s something in that for us. Because life changes us. It just does. It may do it slowly, but all of us who have lived a few years recognize this. Think about all the things that change us.
Time changes us. Responsibility changes us. Love changes us. Grief changes us. Success changes us. Failure changes us. The people who come into our lives change us, and sometimes the people who leave our lives change us even more.
None of us are the people we were twenty years ago.
At least, I hope we’re not.
There’s a popular idea that says we should always “be true to ourselves.” And I understand what that’s trying to say.
It’s part of the admirable something about the Dolly I saw all those years ago. She didn’t seem to need everybody around her to reinforce the fact that she was a star. The show was over. There was work to do. She put on her jeans and helped. That’s just what you do when you come from the background she did. You pitch in and do what needs doing. From everything I observed over the years, that rootedness stayed with her.
She didn’t wear her religion on her sleeve, but she seemed to me to embody some deeply Christian values. She stood up for people. She tried to lift people up. She used what she had to make life better for other people. She remained Dolly.
But she certainly didn’t remain unchanged. If anything, she became more and more Dolly.
And I don’t think God calls us to remain unchanged either. In fact, we’d better hope we change. Grace is supposed to change us.
That’s part of what Christians mean when we talk about “growing in grace.” God loves us as we are, but God’s love doesn’t simply leave us where we are.
We learn. We stumble. We get some things wrong.
Sometimes we get them spectacularly wrong.
We discover things about ourselves we’d rather not know. We discover strengths we didn’t know we had. We learn to forgive. We learn to ask forgiveness. We learn that some of the things we thought mattered enormously really don’t, and some of the things we barely noticed turn out to matter a great deal.
Somewhere along the way, we become somebody we couldn’t have been when we were seventeen.
Joseph certainly did. I sometimes wonder what seventeen-year-old Joseph would have thought if you could have shown him the man he would become.
He might not have recognized himself either.
Remember, Joseph never got his old life back. After all, a butterfly can’t go back to being a caterpillar.
God was faithful to Joseph, but God’s faithfulness didn’t mean restoring everything to the way it had been before his brothers threw him into that pit. Joseph didn’t get his adolescence back. He didn’t get those lost years with his father back. He didn’t somehow awaken one morning and discover that all the painful things had never happened.
God was with Joseph in the life he actually had. Maybe that’s something some of us need to hear. We can spend a lot of time trying to get back to who we used to be.
Back before the loss, the disappointment, the diagnosis.
Back before the divorce, before the children grew up, before the job ended.
Back before we made that mistake. Before life went in a direction we never expected.
And, for sure, sometimes there are things from our past that we need to recover.
But I’m pretty sure the most useful question is not, “How do I get back to the person I used to be?”
The better question is, “Who is God helping me become here?” Not back there. Here. In this life. With this history. With these scars and these memories and these people and these responsibilities and whatever wisdom we’ve managed to accumulate along the way.
Who are we becoming?
There’s something else in Joseph’s story I hadn’t really thought much about before. His brothers didn’t recognize Joseph, true, but Joseph didn’t really know them anymore either. Oh, he knew who they were, of course. But he didn’t know who they had become, any more than they knew what he had become.
Twenty-two years had passed. And we know from the rest of the story that at least one of them had changed profoundly.
Judah was no longer the man who had once been willing to sell his brother and go home to his father with a lie. Did you know that was his idea? He’s the one who suggested that.
Now, standing before the man they thought an Egyptian second only to Pharaoh, when another brother was threatened, Judah offered himself instead.
Same family. Same kind of choice. Different man.
Which makes me wonder how often we keep people trapped in the version of them we remember.
“He’s always been like that.”
“She’ll never change.”
“You know what he did.”
And maybe we do the same thing to ourselves. We remember the worst choice we made. The failure. The person we were during a season of our lives we’re not particularly proud of.
And we assume that’s still who we are.
But grace leaves room for surprise, for growth. Grace leaves room for somebody to face an old kind of choice and make a different one. Grace leaves room for us to become people that even those who knew us years ago might not immediately recognize.
The goal is to keep becoming, without losing what matters most.
I think that’s what struck that young security guard at Opryland all those years ago. I had no idea then what Dolly Parton would become. I certainly had no idea what I would become. Neither of us was finished. None of us is.
Faith doesn’t promise to take us backward. The good news is that God meets us here. God loves the person we have been and walks with the person we are. And by grace, God is still shaping the person we’re becoming.
Would you pray with me?
Father, thank you for loving us through all the people we have been and all the changes life has brought us. Help us hold on to what matters, let go of what doesn’t, and stay open to the work of your grace. And give us grace enough to believe that other people can change, too. Keep shaping us into the people you created us to become. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
