For years, I have held the story of Joseph close to my heart. His great-grandfather was Abraham, who was called a friend of God because he left the land of his forefathers to journey to a land he did not know. Joseph’s grandfather, Isaac, had Joseph’s father, Jacob. It was Jacob whom God ordained as his chosen, renaming him from his given name, which meant “deceiver” to the name God ordained for his people: “one who wrestles with God.” It is from this lineage, depicted in Torah (the Old Testament) that the reader of the text is told again and again of the faithfulness of God: “I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.”
And Joseph. Joseph has been a favorite of mine since I was first introduced to his character in my youth. I remember watching a movie (it’s name escapes me now) in which Joseph was depicted as a strapping young man whose dreams were deferred as a result of his brothers’ jealousy.
“I am Joseph,” he wept bitterly, as the brothers who sold him into slavery stood before him. “Does my father still live?”
Joseph had a creative personality and a soul full of dreams. And he shared them with his brothers, who were pitted against him because of his father’s favoritism. Favoritism does horrible things to families. It drives a wedge in between siblings. It breeds divisiveness, bitterness, and resentment. Favoritism, whether in Joseph’s family lineage or the families of origin we derive from, never breeds good fruit.
Despite the broken family system he was born into, however, Joseph himself was a man with large hopes and ideas for the future. A dreamer, Joseph saw visions of leadership in his mind’s eye. Yet, when he shared the ideas with his brothers, whose bitterness and resentment had grown into rage, they threw him into a pit to be found by slave catchers. Joseph was taken captive and would endure thirteen years of tribulation, including imprisonment under false accusations, before he was delivered from his plight.
As a child, I related to Joseph as a fellow creative and dreamer. I saw his desire to do great things and evoke change in the world; to be a leader; and I related to that.
As an adult, I relate to the struggles he faced. I relate to the reality of possessing dreams deferred and the effect it must have had on his heart in the thirteen years while he waited for his destiny to show up.
I graduated college into the 2008 recession, with a BA in English, and a minor in Africana Studies. I applied to jobs everywhere. I looked near and far, put out numerous applications, and eventually took the first role which was offered to me. After nine months of applying, I started my post-grad career at $12 an hour as an Office Assistant in downtown San Francisco. This began a career path I tried to change numerous times, but once the ball got rolling, it was persistent. 12 years later, I have worked at Columbia, Stanford, and Seattle Universities, and am currently employed through the University of Washington. All are esteemed institutions, and yet, I cannot say that I feel passionate or called to the nature of the rolls I have held. The full-time work I have done for the last twelve years has been administrative in nature. Tiny, innumerable details; support of other people’s vision and dreams. All the while, I have been an author. An artist. A truth teller. A dreamer. I come alive when sweeping bold, vibrant strokes across the canvas or the page. I relate to Joseph, because I know what it feels like to have so much more in your heart than the world has been willing to give you opportunity for.
So, I have created opportunities myself. I have written blogs for publications while in school full time and working half time. I have written, self-edited and published a book that helped me to write, and others to read. I have persevered over and over and over again until perseverance became a way of life. What other choice did I have? Quit? Give Up? It’s not in my DNA to do that.
Some people balk when they see the title of my book: Brave. Warrior. Free.: Overcoming Anxiety in my Turbulent Twenties. They may think its prideful, to call oneself a warrior. I don’t have a priority centered around pride. What I am in possession of is a Spirit which refuses to tell anything but the truth. To fight down the demons I have fought, of panic and racism and anxiety, and still come out with kindness and goodness inside of me…I have had to be a warrior. I will tell the truth about who I am.
That is why I so relate to Joseph. That is why I so relate to the community in America that is mine, the Black community, calling for change. Because we have been forced to live for too long under identities which don't match who we are, or who we were created by God to be.
I think of Joseph, of how he was able to stand strong in who he was and who he was called to be, to remain steadfast in believing his purpose would come, even after thirteen years of circumstances which screamed at him otherwise, and I realize what enabled him to persevere had to be something that came from outside of himself.
Similarly, the Black community in America today would not exist where it not for hope and faith, which the Reverend Al Sharpton so eloquently pointed out at the memorial service for George Floyd (June 4, 2020), murdered by Minneapolis police officers in May of this year.
“I know that years ago Reverend (Jesse) Jackson told us ‘keep hope alive.’ I know that (former) President Barak Obama wrote a book about hope.” Sharpton continued, “I want you to know, in my life, there are times that I have lost hope. There are things in life that happen which make you lose hope. But there is something that is a sister to hope: faith. Faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things unseen.”
There are times when we will feel hopeless, and it’s the exact right human response to what we have endured. To deny that reality, to push down the grief and pain and holy rage which rises to the surface is to do our selves a disservice as those who are created in the image of God. For it is the Spirit of God who breathes from within us, and being that we are made in Their image, to deny righteous anger and undue pain is to lie about how we were made.
Like Joseph, some of us have walked through thirteen years of no movement in an area. For others, it has been twenty. For still others, an entire people group, perhaps, it has been 401 years of slavery and oppression, with those who wish to keep us enslaved “standing on our necks.”
No person has the wherewithal to keep hope alive and to keep going when their circumstances scream hopelessness. Joseph, wrongfully accused and imprisoned, then forgotten in a prison cell, had to have been in community with a Source that was greater than his own. A people group would not be standing in solidarity today, marching amidst a worldwide health pandemic while fighting a racial one, if not for the Ruach (the breath, the wind, the Spirit of God) sending oxygen into their veins.
“From the end of the earth, I cry to you, when my heart is faint. Lead me to the rock that is higher than I.” Psalm 61:2 (NRSV)
The reason we are able to have joy, even in the midst of hopeless situations, is because we know that even as we find ourselves in circumstances which feel as though there is no hope, we are not alone in it. We have friends who stand by us and demand change, even if that change requires personal responsibility and sacrifice. We have pockets and moments of encouragement and love that tell us that there are still good things in the world, like loving on our family members with good food when we are all out of words. We find joy in the little things: a bouquet of red roses, access to waterfronts, a kind word, a postcard in the mail. When all else fails, we find hope in the compassionate ear and wide-stretched arms of an outraged, hurting God (whom I believe sometimes wonders if He gave humanity too much freedom to do as they wish), who pulls us up to the cleft of the rock and hides us there when all of our strength is gone. And who nurtures us there until our strength returns.
The way to joy in the midst of suffering is to be a warrior: to fight with those you are in community with; to rest and see the beauty around you; and when you are again able, to stand; knowing your God is indeed the Rock planted steadfast underneath your feet.
