Whoa! You’ve been dumped!
“Why should we shed any blood? Let’s just throw him into this empty cistern here in the wilderness. Then he’ll die without our laying a hand on him.”… So when Joseph arrived, his brothers ripped off the beautiful robe he was wearing. Then they grabbed him and threw him into the cistern. — Genesis 37:22-24, NLT
The camera stays in place when an actor falls on film. The lens doesn’t follow the actor to the ground or floor. The impact itself is not filmed.
I don’t know this for a fact, but I always imagine the actor lands on a mattress. We just never see the mattress.
In a longstanding era of stunt doubles, I imagine actors with long days on sets don’t have even the slightest risk of hurting themselves.
This isn’t Joseph. He is tossed into an empty cistern. This has got to hurt.
The worst pain is that his brothers are about to abandon him.
It’s not difficult to imagine this moment, this brutal toss. Scripture here shares no details, however. The story immediately continues with Joseph being sold into slavery.
Both scripture and we ourselves move too quickly past full-stop, all out painful places. When this happens, we can do what is wrong, which is one, think scripture is unrelatable, two, name our pain as ours alone (no one else experiences our hurts and sorrows quite like we do) and three, think God doesn’t exist, is distant, or doesn’t care.
Joseph is dumped. Somehow (and somewhere), you’ve been dumped, too. I imagine your siblings or best buds haven’t tossed you into an empty well, but I’m certain of this. What I am certain of is that we find ourselves and God when we allow ourselves to see and feel where, exactly, Joseph lands. It’s in a place of pain. Like Joseph, we, too, can get out of where we are because, like Joseph, our God is the same God Joseph looks to, calls on, and follows.
PRAYER: Help us out of the holes, Lord. Help us out of the holes. Amen.
Leave a Reply