OnFire Encouragement Letter

Hi Folks:

Another week is well underway. Jan and Ian are home from their trip to Quebec City. What a beautiful place. Jan wants to take me there sometime because it is so romantic. Sounds good to me.

I got through last week. In ten days I spoke 9 times, bought a house, responded to a motor vehicle accident, conducted three funerals, and hosted a missionary for supper. I’m glad its not always like this. Even with all this, I managed to watch three movies with Mark and make brownies.

There will be no OnFire next week. Apart from the fact that I will be on a canoe trip, so will the guy who manages my list server. Our 85 km trip will take us through the most remote areas of Nova Scotia. As I tell people, we’ll be so far in the sticks we’ll have to come out to get our firewood. I’m looking forward to this.

Blessings for your week.

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In Genesis 39, Joseph went to prison because he spurned the advances of his boss’s wife. It wasn’t just or fair, but Joseph found himself behind bars. Even here, Joseph did well and gained the favour of the warden. Soon he literally ran the place, so well that the warden didn’t concern himself with anything Joseph did.

I found myself having all sorts of strange and conflicting thoughts while reading about Joseph.

My first thought was, “Not again!” He reminds me of a picture I found on the internet of some sort of small animal lying dead on the road, possibly a possum, but it was hard to tell. It was face down, with feet splayed in all four directions and tongue hanging out. But that wasn’t all. Not long after it had been squashed and rolled flat, a highway crew painted a set of double lines right over the dead animal.

I had some pastoral thoughts. Look at how Joseph reacts to his circumstances. Despite being in prison, he still acts with integrity and responsibility. Its true, God was with him and blessed him, but I think we can also see that Joseph worked hard. His true character, as it mushed out the bottom of the stress press, was true and pure.

I thought about the rumour mill in Potiphar’s palace. “Where there’s smoke there’s fire.”  How many people thought he deserved what he got? How many people heard about Joseph and said, “That’s what you get for messing around with the boss’ wife.” The truth doesn’t matter much in the rumour mill. If anything, it gets in the way of a good story. I’m constantly amazed at how people blow up bad stories. I also marvel at how much people only half-hear, and then don’t understand half of that. Makes me want to be really careful, not only when I speak, but also in what I retell (in case I’ve only half-heard or half-understood).

Then my darker, more cynical side, rolled over.  “This isn’t real life.” While there seem to be a few rare individuals who hit skunks and come up smelling like roses, that’s not the way things often work out.

I suspect that one of the unspoken secret beliefs of many people is that the Bible isn’t about real life, that such things only happen to people in the Bible and in movies, but not to them.

Do people like Joseph ever really recover from life’s baggage? Why is life so unfair that some people seem to succeed in life, but not me? Is the Bible more like an urban myth - everyone seems to know someone who knows someone who had something good happen to them, but no one knows personally who?

We don’t often hear these questions in church because I suspect people fear they imply a lack of faith. So they just don’t ask. I don’t think these are such wacky thoughts, however. At least I hope they’re not. They’re the ones I have all the time as I work out my own faith.

The questions themselves aren’t the problem in our faith. Its what we do with them. We can decide we don’t have the answers, so we toss our hands in the air and give up. We can decide that since rotten things have happened in the past, rotten things will always happen.

Or, we can decide differently. Faith is all about not having the answers, not knowing the future, but deciding anyway that we are going to believe that God is good, that he walks with us, and that the future has better things in store for us.

These are hard things to believe because it requires us to look beyond the past and overlook what is happening right now to trust the unknown future to God. But that is what got Joseph through. We can admire his character, but underneath his character was this kind of faith in God.

I hope this helps. Be OnFire.

Troy

ON FIRE is a weekly letter of encouragement by Troy Dennis. To be added to or removed from the ON FIRE list contact him at onfireletter@gmail.com . Archives are located at http://www.onfireletter.com This letter published May 21, 2008.