just a tiny part of the food table at Meena and Vit’s wedding.
Yes, I finally have one and it’s fantastic! Above is a screenshot of where I am right now and it’s really accurate considering I’m inside a large building.
In recent times I’ve been thinking a lot about a point that I’ve heard both Mark Madavan and Nick Page make in different ways.
Basically it is that we read the stories in our bible from the perspective of ‘now’ and so we don’t see just how great the faith in God was during the story.
For example, think about some common bible stories that you might have learned in Sunday School; Daniel in the lion’s den, Jonah and the Whale, Joseph and his coat of many colours.
Take Joseph. Genesis 37 to 46 tell the story of Joseph and we pretty much take it as ‘good guy breezes through difficult circumstances and all is good at the end because God is in control.’ Rather like the musical ‘Joseph and his Technicolor Dreamcoat.”
However, there are two key things that Mark and Nick pointed out.
(1) If you stop the story at any of the key points (sold by his brothers, taken to a land he didn’t know, a slave with no freedom, wrongfully accused of a crime, at least two years in prison, forgotten about by people who he helped) then his life was sheer misery. The bad guys had won!
(2) He kept his faith in God all the way through the bad times. It doesn’t mention that he tried to escape from the circumstances he found himself in. He was reliable as a slave and his master liked him. He became a ‘trusty’ in prison. He obviously exhibited the personality and integrity of a true Christian even when everything must have felt like it was against him.
The first point applies to Jonah and Daniel and many others and yet in sometimes odd ways the second point also applies to them all. If you think about Noah his faith must have been awesome! His quest to build an ark is the equivalent of building a Supertanker in Birmingham (Alabama or the UK – you choose!)
The BAD GUYS WON!
We know the whole story so we usually don’t stop to think how these people must have felt at the points in the story where everything was going pear-shaped. Maybe we should stop and think more often about the middle of stories rather than the end of them.
And as an aside, how would my church (or yours) cope if Joseph turned up there? Slave, ex-jailbird, no apparent family. Would we welcome him? Or would we wait until he became second in command of the country and then welcome him?