Life can be desperately difficult. The impact of the fall is everywhere and hard things come at us each day. Sometimes it feels relentless. Sometimes we’ll want to weep. Of course, the Lord has deep compassion for us in those moments - his love and care never fades - but, we don’t always remember that. When it’s hard, it’s easy to get distracted and let our minds think things that just aren’t true. We don’t just experience events; we interpret them too. And the events that fuel our anxiety can nudge us towards an awful conclusion: that life is spiralling out of control.
In the first book of the Bible, we meet a man called Joseph. To put it mildly, Joseph had reasons to wonder if life was spiralling out of control!
He was born into a large family and one where the relationships were more than a little strained. His brothers hated him so deeply that they plotted to kill him and only relented when they saw an opportunity to make some cash.
They sold him into slavery, and he was trafficked into a foreign land. There he went into the service of a man whose wife was not an upright or trustworthy woman. She made several passes at him and, when he rejected her advances, accused him of attempted rape. The result was that he was thrown into prison for a crime he didn’t commit.
"Joseph may have suffered greatly, but he was able to keep going because he knew something extraordinarily important. He knew that nothing in his life was out of control—even though it was out of his control."
While locked up he made a couple of good friends. He knew one would be released and would return to the king’s service quite soon, and so Joseph asked that friend to help expedite his own release. But his friend forgot. It wasn’t until the most powerful man in the country needed some help that finally the light at the end of the tunnel began to shine through.
Joseph had a gift—with God’s help he could interpret dreams—and so when the Pharaoh had a dream he didn’t understand, Joseph was allowed out of prison to help. It was a step in the right direction, to be sure, but certainly not a relaxing day. There was Joseph, no longer incarcerated but now standing before a powerful king delivering a very unwelcome message: the significance of the dream was that the nation would soon face a life-threatening famine.
In the ancient world it was never safe to give kings bad news. But Joseph wasn’t punished. Instead, he was given a job with more responsibility and pressure than most of us could even begin to imagine: to navigate an entire nation through the process of stockpiling resources that would help them survive the disaster to come. Oh, and then the brothers who had sold him into slavery turned up.
Words of help and hope form the Bible for both Christians and non-Christians who feel anxious.
Can you imagine what Joseph’s life must have been like? Can you begin to get your head around the catalogue of disasters—traumas—that he faced? All that uncertainty, a catalogue of betrayals, pressure beyond measure. In his shoes I think I would have felt more than a bit anxious! And yet, when he finally had a heart-to-heart with the brothers who had kick-started such a lifetime of uncertainty and pain, he said this:
You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good. (Genesis 50 v 20)
Joseph may have suffered greatly, but he was able to keep going because he knew something extraordinarily important. He knew that nothing in his life was out of control—even though it was out of his control.
There was plenty that was painful. There was a great deal that was evil and wrong. God certainly did not condone the way others treated Joseph. But over the painfulness of Joseph’s experiences, there lay the perfection of God’s plans—plans which meant that nothing of Joseph’s horrors went to waste. God wove together the messy strands of Joseph’s life in such a beautiful way that it culminated in this unpopular young man leading a nation through a crisis and saving the lives of many. What looked like chaos turned out to contain deep hope.
Our stories are not the same as Joseph’s. It is highly unlikely that many of us will taste the depths of his suffering or the responsibility of his national leadership. But his life does point to an unchanging reality: our world is not out of control.
This is an adapted extract from a new book by Helen Thorne, Hope in an Anxious World, which is designed to help both Christian and non-Christian readers understand anxiety better, learn some useful techniques to cope with it and, most importantly, show how the living God can liberate us from its grip. Helen is Director of Training and Resources at Biblical Counselling UK and an experienced counsellor.
Helen Thorne is Director of Training and Resources at Biblical Counselling UK. She formerly worked with the London City Mission and has written Hope in an Anxious World, Purity Is Possible, Walking with Domestic Abuse Sufferers and 5 Things to Pray for Your City. She attends Dundonald Church in Raynes Park, London.