Joseph - The Boy We Were Never Allowed To See

A fresh look at a familiar story.

As we move forward, I am going to, from time to time, dedicate a newsletter to a single biblical character. Simply when one begins speaking loudly enough that it feels worth slowing down for.

The intention is to take figures we believe we already know, and look at them again. To loosen the grip of the familiar interpretations we inherited. To step outside the box of limiting religion and see what may have been waiting for us all along, hidden in plain sight.

To finish this month of May, I begin with Joseph. A major influencer in my own story over the years, but before we go further, a clarification. 

This is not a judgement of Joseph. 

If anything is being judged here, it is the long and damaging tradition of turning biblical characters into untouchable heroes. The attempt to sculpt them into figures who somehow performed their way into God's favour. The quiet assumption that God blessed them because they got it right.

This is the very thing this newsletter will gently dismantle. 

Simply, because when we make them perfect, we make ourselves disqualified and miss the whole point of these stories. 

The Joseph I Was Given

For many years I was handed a man who seemed almost alien. Unshakable and unwavering with a faith that never blinked. 

A clean record that, if I am honest, felt too clean. 

I would sit in pews and hear from the front that God was with Joseph because Joseph had faith. The way it was told, he never doubted or struggled. He simply trusted, and so heaven had no choice but to move on his behalf.

I would leave those gatherings feeling further from God.  If that was the performing measure, I would never reach it. 

This Joseph did not inspire me. He discouraged me. Somehow, I suspect I am not the only one.

A Closer Look

When I began to read the story without the costume the pulpit had placed on him, I found a man who had bad days. 

A man who noticed sadness and depression in two servants because he understood these two familiar emotions himself. You only recognise something that quickly in others when you first know it well in yourself.

I found a man whose faith was not as seamless as we have been told. When he interprets the cupbearer's dream, he asks to be remembered. He asks to be pulled out. There is nothing wrong with this. It is simply human. Yet, it tells us something. 

His eyes were not only on God. They were also on the door.

A man settled in quiet trust, waiting on God alone for his deliverance, does not lead with the favor he is owed. He does not slip his name into the conversation as insurance. He waits, he rests, and he keeps his gaze on the One who sees him in the pit.

Joseph did not always do this and that is precisely what makes him so much like us. 

It shows us that faith is not, and does not need to be, perfect for it to be faith. 

Doubting does not disqualify our faith as much as it does by pretending that it is perfect. 

Consider that doubt is the way God enlarges the place within us where faith originates, using it as the stepping stones to guide us on. In my life I have come to understand that it takes great faith to doubt and not the other way around.

The presence of doubt in our lives, like in Joseph's, means our faith is breathing and working itself out one moment at a time. 

Doubt being part of the journey is not a flaw to be hidden. It is a truth we need to embrace, as it finally lets us breathe and be real with God, with ourselves, and with the world around us.

Ultimately, a faith that can embrace doubt is a faith that can literally transform our lives and understand that this has been based all along on Gods perfect nature and not our perfect performance.

The Good Boy Who Expected the World to Love Him Back

Now, here is something I have sat with for a long time. 

Joseph was the favourite son. It is the soil he grew in. 

A coat. A father's gaze that lingered longer on him than on the others. A position in the family that was never earned. Only given.

What does that do to a young heart?

In my humble opinion, it plants what I have come to call the good boy syndrome.

He begins to expect the world to treat him the way his father did. He walks into rooms expecting affection. He tells his dreams to his brothers without sensing the weight of what he is placing on them. He does not read the room because, in his home, the room had always read him. He was spoiled and entitled because he was loved in a way that did not prepare him for a world that would not love him the same. 

His label served his father's heart. It did not serve his life.

This is why, in the midst of rejection and the apparent abandonment of the world, he eventually arrives at the only place where God's real, unshakable, and unconditional love can finally be experienced.

The Room We Dont Talk About

Then there is Potiphar's wife. 

I admire Joseph running. Truly. To leave a garment behind is no small act of surrender. 

Yet I find myself sitting with a quieter question.  

Why did he not leave the moment she walked in? Why was he in that part of the house at all, knowing what he must have known by then?

Let me stay with him for a moment. 

Joseph was no fool. He had been managing Potiphar's entire household for some time. He knew the rhythms of that home. He knew where the servants were and were not. He knew the hours she kept. He knew which rooms she moved through and when. 

So when she stepped into that room, did it truly surprise him? 

Or had something in him already calculated that it might? 

I am not accusing him of anything. I am wondering with him. 

Why did he not bring another servant with him into the house that day? Why did he not arrange his work in a way that kept others nearby? Why did he not change the hours of certain tasks once he sensed her interest? He had the authority to do so. He was overseeing everything.

These are the questions I want to ask gently, without judgment, because I have asked them of myself in other rooms of my own life. 

When she finally walked in and the door felt heavy with intention, what moved inside him in those first seconds before he ran? 

Did a part of him freeze? 

Did a part of him feel flattered?

Did a part of him, the wounded part, the part still hungry for validation, hear in her voice something that sounded almost like the recognition he had been waiting for all his life?

We rarely ask these questions of Joseph. We prefer him spotless. We prefer the tidy version. Yet I believe the tidy version robs him of his humanity and robs us of his usefulness, even if we often use it to justify our “trying harder” approach.

Now stay with me here, because this is where the threads begin to meet. 

Consider that the entitlement Joseph carried from being his father's favourite did not stay in his childhood. It travelled with him. It walked into every room he entered. When you couple that entitlement with dreams given to a young man whose heart was not yet trained to carry them, and an ego that had been quietly fed for years, you have a combustible mixture. 

He had been shown, in vision, a future of leadership, visibility, sheaves bowing and stars bending toward him.

So I wonder…

Did some quiet voice in him whisper that being desired by the wife of the most powerful man in his world was, in some twisted way, confirmation of the dream? Did being wanted by her feel, for a flicker of a moment, like the bowing he had been promised?

I am not saying he believed this consciously. I am saying these things move beneath consciousness. They move in the body before the mind catches up.

The wounded part of him, the part still hungry for the validation his coat had once symbolised, would have been driven by something subtle and powerful. A quiet angst. A whisper that said, you must see these dreams fulfilled in order to finally get there and be seen the way you were once seen.

When that part of us is not processed, not healed, not brought into the light, it leads us into far more rooms than Potiphar's. It walks us through doors we were not meant to open. 

It can convince us, in tones so soft we mistake them for guidance, that this might be the room. This relationship. This opportunity. This compromise. This might finally be where the dream becomes real.

I know this voice well. 

So we step in because we are wounded, hungry, and the dream still has a debt to collect.

I keep returning to the moment before the running. Because the running is glorious. Yet the running was only possible because something deeper in Joseph had been forming all those years in captivity waiting in chains he could not yet see. 

His connection with God is what eventually moved his feet. That is the part I do not question. When the moment came and only running would do, the running came from somewhere true in him.

But what kept him in the room before the running came? What slowed his feet? Was it really a woman being able to overpower a man that had used his hands and body for years, a man whose strength would have been considerable?

Or what part of him was still negotiating, still curious, still half listening to the voice of his own unhealed hunger? I ask these questions not to diminish him.

I ask them to find him.

Joseph walked into that house carrying years of unprocessed favouritism, years of dreams whispering at his back, and years of an ego that had been told it was special long before it had been taught it was simply human.

I am not saying Joseph wanted to fall. Far from it. I am saying he was a man with a body, with awareness, and with the same flickers of curiosity any of us would have. He had wounds dressed in the clothing of destiny. He may have walked closer to the fire than perhaps he ought to, until the moment came when only running would do. 

This does not diminish him. It makes him real.

A real Joseph is far more useful to our lives than a fictional one.

'A real Joseph inspires me so much…as I he hope he does for you too.

What This Story Is Actually About

Here is what I want to offer you. 

The way we read and see this story will go a long way in helping us to see what kind of God we believe in and what we believe is important to him. It will also help us to understand why we have the priorities we have in our spiritual journey.

The story of Joseph is not about Joseph's perfect performance.

It is about what God is able to do despite what happens. 

It is about the truth that no matter what any person does to us, no matter what we do to ourselves, no matter how many rooms we should not have entered or dreams we should not have shared, God is able to work it out.  

If we remain connected to the vine Yeshua shared with us.

That is the only line in the sand.

Not performance. Not flawless faith. Not a record without smudges. 

Connection that is real.

As real connection is rooted in abiding and not in consistent performing.

This is why I believe that like us, Joseph too, contributed to what happened for him. His pride contributed. His entitlement contributed. His unguarded steps contributed. Like they contribute for all of us.

Even so, 

the thread held for him as it will hold for us too if we remain connected.

What I Want You to Consider This Coming Month

If you have ever felt that you were too much of a mess for your life to mean something, this is for you. 

If you have been told that the heroes of the old stories were untouchable, and you have quietly wondered why you are not, this is for you. 

You were never meant to read these stories and feel disqualified. 

You were meant to read them and feel found.

Joseph was a boy who was loved in an unhealthy way by being loved too narrowly. He was a young man who carried entitlement into rooms that did not bow to him. He was a human being who doubted, manoeuvred, and walked too close to fire, as we all do at one stage or another. The story still ended well.

Not because of him but because of the One who remained connected with him through it all.

That is the Gospel hidden inside this story. 

That is the Gospel I want to invite you to consider tasting this June.

With you in the unfolding,

Pablo