Remember Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat? The Bible story, not the Andrew Lloyd Weber musical. Promising young kid, his brothers hate him because their father likes him best. They sell him to the Ishmaelites and tell the dad he died in the wilderness. Then he gets sold as a slave in Egypt. While there he gains the favor of one of Pharaoh’s officials and becomes his right-hand man. The kid is pretty handsome, so the official’s wife tries to seduce him. When he won’t be seduced she accuses him of trying to rape her, and he's sent to prison for a few years. In prison the warden likes him so he gets promoted to top-prisoner, which I bet isn’t as nice as it sounds. After a while he interprets a dream for Pharaoh, which Pharaoh appreciates, so Joseph gets elevated as far as he can without actually assuming Pharaoh’s title. Then the whole thing with the brothers coming to Egypt for food during the seven-year famine and the Hebrews moving down to Egypt and enjoying a brief time of happiness before becoming slaves for a few hundred years. That story. Remember?
There’s a point to this, hold on.
I’ve been back in the States for seven months now and I’m still really confused about what to do next. My three years overseas gave me a whole new perspective on the world, life, cultures, God, everything. Now I’m back where I started, and some days it feels like I’m heading nowhere, or like the three-year adventure was a total waste.
Part of the problem is that I’ve had to return to my old job as a bus driver. I took this job in college as a way to make extra cash, and it turned into a nice safety net that I can fall into when other options aren’t available. Coming home to a recession, I thought it was natural to come back to the bus-driving nest until I figure out what step to take next.
Recently a friend pretty much told me to run for my life. He basically said that I have some potential and promise and could do much better than bus driving, and he encouraged me to get out soon and move on to something more worthy. My vanity heard this and said, “Yeah, I’m made for something better than this. This job will eat my soul, I have to get out of here fast.”
But, recollecting a conversation I had with another friend, I checked that thought for a minute. She asked me what kinds of jobs I thought I wanted to do. I told her the only thing I was certain of was that I didn’t want to be a bus driver. After a second she said, “But God obviously wants you to be driving buses right now.” I thought about it for a while. If God is as powerful as I believe he is, and involved in our day-to-day lives, he is definitely able to take care of my employment situation. It seems to follow that if he, like me, definitely didn’t want me driving buses right now, he would have provided another job for me by now. Despite my sending ten resumes a week in response to every job advertisement I’m remotely qualified for, I still have not found another job. God hasn’t provided the right opportunity yet. My friend seems to be right and this is what God wants me to be doing at the moment.
This is something that we, in our culture, get hung up on. We have the American Dream at heart, and we think that anyone should be able to accomplish great things if they work hard and apply themselves appropriately. As kids we’re taught to dream big and reach for the stars, and we’re disappointed when we grow up to become paper salesmen and mechanics and bus drivers.
As American Christians, I think we need to get rid of our sense of entitlement to the American Dream. Not that it’s bad to pursue dreams or to work hard at making a difference in the world. But we need to put God back where he belongs. He needs to be First, front and center in our lives.
Back to Joseph. There was a promising lad if ever I saw one. The guy had it all. Everyone liked him, he was obviously smart, attractive, etc. For a kid like that in America, we’d hope he’d have all the great opportunities that life could hand him. College education, chances to travel, good relationships, a good job where he can make an impact. But Joseph had some tough experiences. His brothers sold him and told his dad he was dead. He was a slave. He was wrongly imprisoned, and that for years. I’m sure there were moments in those periods when he figured he was through. He probably felt like he was stuck forever, that his chances of fulfilling the dreams he had as a kid were gone forever.
The point is: God had a plan for Joseph. That’s a comforting thought and all, but think about it for a second. Even when Joseph was in the dungeon he was living out God’s plan. There were things God wanted to teach him, and us, and things God wanted to reveal about himself through the periods of imprisonment and slavery. Years of his life were spent in the very opposite of what the American Dream would wish on the guy, and it was exactly where he needed to be.
Look at some other Bible success stories. The Apostle Paul spent a lot of time in prison. He was stoned a few times, shipwrecked, flogged. The Prophet Jeremiah had like one friend in the entire kingdom and talked about how he wished his head were a spring of water so he could cry as much as he felt like crying. Heck, Jesus was a pretty promising young man until God killed him in his prime. So where do I get off presuming that the American Dream is God’s plan for my life?
I’m still hoping to move away from bus driving as soon as I can. But I think I’ve turned a corner in my understanding. God’s wisdom is inscrutable, and I’m going to trust that he knows what he’s doing with me. It makes it a lot easier to restrain myself from running people down and crushing them with my bus when I think of the job in terms of God’s will instead of my own.
