Day 30 – Take Off Your Sandals. This Ground Is Holy.

Take Off Your Sandals. This Ground Is Holy. Genesis ended with a dying man asking to carry his bones home. Four hundred years have passed since then. The family of seventy that walked into Egypt has become a nation of millions and Pharaoh is terrified of them. Exodus opens not with triumph but with chains. […]

Day 29 – What God Intended All Along

What God Intended All Along. We have been in Genesis for most of this month. We have watched God make a world, lose it to sin, rescue it through a flood, call a man from Ur, wrestle with his grandson, and orchestrate a betrayal in a pit that became the salvation of a continent. And […]

Day 28 – I Will Go With You

I Will Go With You. Jacob is one hundred and thirty years old. He has buried a wife he loved and mourned a son he thought was dead for twenty-two years. He has wrestled with God and walked with a limp ever since. He has watched his family fracture and hold and fracture again. And […]

Day 27 – You Meant It for Evil. God Meant It for Good.

You Meant It for Evil. God Meant It for Good. Something has changed in Judah. The man who sold his brother is now offering himself as surety for his brother. Twenty years of living with what he did has done something to him. The guilt that the brothers felt when they saw Joseph’s distress and […]

Day 26 – The Moment the Pit Was Preparing Him For

The Moment the Pit Was Preparing Him For Two years. That is how long Joseph waited in prison after the cupbearer forgot him. Two years of doing his job faithfully in a cell. Two years of interpreting dreams correctly and watching nothing change for himself. Two years of not knowing whether the promise in his […]

Day 25 – Faithful in the Dark

Faithful in the Dark Genesis 38 is the chapter that interrupts the Joseph story at its most suspenseful moment. Joseph has just been sold to Potiphar. We want to follow him. We want to know what happens in Egypt. And instead the narrative pivots to Judah and what follows is one of the most uncomfortable, […]

Day 24 – The Boy With the Dreams

The Boy With the Dreams. God tells Jacob to go back to Bethel. The place where the ladder touched the ground. The place where a fugitive slept on a stone and woke up knowing that God was in that place. Jacob has been away from Bethel for twenty years through Haran, through Laban, through the […]

Day 23 – The Night Everything Changed

The Night Everything Changed. Jacob has been running most of his life. Running from Esau after the stolen blessing. Running from Laban after twenty years of labour and manipulation. And now, finally heading home, he gets word that Esau is coming to meet him with four hundred men. Jacob is terrified. And the terror is […]

Day 22 – When God Says It Is Time to Go

When God Says It Is Time to Go. Jacob has been in Haran for twenty years. Twenty years away from the land of promise, from his parents, from Bethel where he saw the ladder and heard the voice of God. He arrived with nothing but a stone for a pillow. He leaves with two wives, […]

Day 21 – The Ladder Is Still Standing

The Ladder Is Still Standing. Jacob is not an easy man to like at the start of his story. He is a schemer. A manipulator. A man who waits in the kitchen with stew while his brother is out working, who dresses in his brother’s clothes and stands in front of his blind father and […]