Narrative Lectionary Key Verse for Today
“[Joseph’s brothers] saw him from a distance, and before he came near to them, they conspired to kill him. They said to one another, ‘Here comes this dreamer. Come now, let us kill him and throw him into one of the pits; then we shall say that a wild animal has devoured him, and we shall see what will become of his dreams.’”
NL Daily Devotion for Saturday, September 26, 2026
by R. M. Fergus, Clergy Stuff
Silly boys, to think they could stop God’s plan. As I said a couple days back, Genesis is largely about God keepings God’s promises in the face of seemingly impossible odds. What’s a little attempted murder in the face of honest-to-goodness destiny? For some reason it makes me think of the horror trope where the characters do something that should obviously solve whatever terrifying problem they’re dealing with only to find out that their action was precisely the thing that had to happen to unleash the evil’s full power. Only, you know, in a good way. We have these flawed, understandably hurt young men convinced they need only get rid of Joseph to break the “curse” of his dreams predicting them bowing down to him, but their actions actually create the exact conditions under which they (unknowingly) bow down to him and—surprise!—it’s because they’ve placed him in a position to ultimately save their lives.
I wonder how often we, as flawed and understandably hurt individuals, take action we intend to solve our own problems only to experience a completely different—and immeasurably better—outcome. As for me, I have spent 20+ years in 12-Step recovery leaning into the truth that “When we look back, we realize that the things which came to us when we put ourselves in God's hands were better than anything we could have planned.” (Alcoholics Anonymous, p. 100).
When have I experienced an unexpected outcome better than what I had planned?
