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13 January. Genesis chapters 37 to 40
Joseph is remembered for being a ‘dreamer’. Often that is used as a derogatory term, as it was by his brothers when they decided to kill him, a sentence that was commuted to being sold into slavery. When I was at school teachers often criticised me for looking out of the window, ‘daydreaming’, rather than concentrating on what they were saying. But it didn’t mean I wasn’t listening. Just that sometimes we have to let someone else’s words take flight in our own minds in order to apply them to ourselves.
I also tend to have quite vivid dreams at night, some of which can be understood in the morning as relating to my current situation, and others prompt me to pray for the people who have appeared in them. I don’t think of these as revelations from God as certain of Joseph’s dreams were, but perhaps he had a similarly ‘overactive imagination’, as my wife says, as a precondition for being open to God speaking to him in this way.
Many of Joseph’s divine dreams, or his interpretation of other people’s dreams (discernment, which is said in the New Testament to be one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit), took a long time to come to fruition. Even when his interpretation of a fellow servant’s dream in prison foretold that man’s release, he himself did not benefit until his interpretation was remembered two years later. Gifts that God gives are usually for the benefit of other people, not ourselves, and prophetic dreams, like any other prophecy will be fulfilled at the ‘right’ time, which calls for patience. Thank God fo trhe gift of imagination, and dreaming.