Thursday, March 29, 2018

Genesis 41:1 -- On Patience and Faith

"And it came to pass at the end of two full years, that Pharaoh dreamed: and, behold, he stood by the river."
Genesis 41:1


This verse is from the story of Joseph, and the "two full years" are significant here because Joseph spent them in prison.  He had been wrongly accused, thrown in jail, and then interpreted a dream for Pharaoh's butler, but it took two years for Pharaoh's butler to remember what he had done and put in a good word for him.  Significantly, the day that he did is the day that Joseph went from being an inmate to a powerful ruler in Egypt.

The lesson that we can take away from all of this I think is one of faith.  If we do as God asks and put our trust in him, then we will be delivered out of our "trials, and [our] troubles, and [our] afflictions" (Alma 38:5). However, the delivery, as in Joseph's case, might not be immediate.  Patience is required, because God's timing is perfect, and doesn't always conform to our ideas of how long something is tolerable.  Joseph had been sold into slavery by his brothers and gone through a lot before he ended up being in jail at the perfect time for all of this to happen.  To any external observer, his life didn't look like he was on the way up.  And yet, God's plan worked (as it always does), and Joseph became what God had prepared him to be.

Today, let's have faith that we too will be delivered as we put our trust in God... but let's also have patience, because it's going to happen on God's schedule and not ours.  That's actually good, and makes everything better, but it is hard to wait for sometimes.  In the meantime, let's do as Joseph did and make the world around us better, no matter where we are.

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