It was Mark Twain who said, “There are two great days in a person’s life. The first is the day we’re born, and the second is the day we discover why.” It seems to me the first one is a whole lot easier to determine than the second. The first one is the date you made your first public appearance … the moment those that love you come together and help you celebrate every year. But the second is much tougher to nail down because, many times, it takes a long time to discover why we were born—in fact, there are some people who go through life and never figure it out. Some folks are never able to clearly articulate why they were placed on this planet.
A little over a month ago, I attended the Global Leadership Summit 2024—a world class leadership training event livestreamed to almost 500 satellite sites across the country that had more than 75000 registrants. One of the speakers was Arthur C. Brooks—a professor at the Harvard School of Business who teaches a course on the science of happiness. It doesn’t sound like it should be a part of the curriculum at a renowned school like Harvard, but it’s one of the most popular courses on campus. In his 30-minute presentation, he talked about what makes for happiness—that happiness is tied to having a sense of meaning in your life. He also shared how he gives his students a two-question quiz on the first day of class to determine if they have a meaning crisis. The questions? (1) Why were you born? And (2) For what would you happily give your life at this moment? The way to pass the test is by having real answers. If a student humhaws around or says, “I don’t know”, they’ve failed.
As I was thinking about this, my mind went back to a press conference I saw a dozen or so years ago in the wake of the Boston marathon bombing. A massive manhunt ensued that essentially put the city of Boston on lockdown for a few days. Police released surveillance images of the two suspects and, three days later, authorities tracked them to an area around the campus of MIT—the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Sometime that evening, they snuck up behind the patrol car of an officer named Sean Collier and shot him five times. He was rushed to a nearby hospital but pronounced dead shortly after arrival. He was only 27 years old.
I remember watching the press conference with Collier’s boss—the head of the campus police department at MIT—who was absolutely gutted by what happened. He had glowing things to say about this young member of his force who’d lost his life so tragically and senselessly. And one of the things he said was, “Sean was born to be a police officer. He was one of these guys that looked at police work as a calling.”
You can probably think of other variations of this theme: She was born to be a mother. He was born to play football. She was born to be a teacher. He was born to be a soldier.
So—why were you born? When I ask that question, I’m not talking about an occupation, profession, or career. Your answer may involve a career, but it’s more than that. It’s deeper than that. I’m talking about a sense of mission … a sense of purpose … a life calling. Some people find their calling fairly early in life while, for others, the revelation doesn’t come until later. Sometimes others can see it in us before we can see it in ourselves. Sometimes we don’t see it at all until our life circumstances reveal it to us—it emerges out of the tumult of life. And some folks, unfortunately, go through life and never figure it out.
To ask, “Why were you born?” is a bit of a misleading question, because there’s a sense in which we don’t discover our life purpose so much as it discovers us. We don’t find it so much as it finds us. So as we continue looking at the story of Joseph, I want us to do so with that question rattling around in our head.
Joseph is one of those guys who didn’t know his life purpose for many years. It was only after a series of events unfolded—nearly all of them outside his control and many of them quite painful—that it became evident. When we first met him, as a teenager, he had no clue what his future involved. If you’d have asked him, he’d have assumed he was destined to be a shepherd like his father, grandfather, great-grandfather and brothers. Joseph had no idea what was about to unfold.
But one thing was painfully obvious. In fact, there’s a word that describes his family—a word you won’t find anywhere in the Bible but one that’s quite common in our current vocabulary—that described his family to a “T.” That word is “dysfunctional.” Joseph grew up in a seriously dysfunctional family. The family featured a father who had a dozen sons by four different women, one of whom—Joseph—was his favorite. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that this dynamic was a disaster waiting to happen. Joseph is the product of a family where jealousy, comparison, distrust, and envy were the rules of the game. But from this we can glean a very important point: Your background, brokenness, and dysfunction is no impediment or handicap to your service to God. Do you carry scars and blemishes as a result of a less-than-ideal background? We all do to some degree—none of us makes it to adulthood unscathed. But that doesn’t restrict or minimize what God can do through the person that comes from such an upbringing. It may make it challenging and difficult, but it doesn’t make it unattainable. What Joseph teaches us is that what’s going on internally is a much greater force as it relates to the course and direction of our life than what’s happening externally. The real problems we face aren’t “out there.” They’re always “in here.” That is where we fight our greatest battles!
This world is a fallen, messed-up place. It doesn’t function the way God intended it to. As a result, some of that mess is inevitably going to find its way into our heart and life. One of the reasons I believe the Bible is true is because it speaks the truth about the human condition. It doesn’t lie to us about our potential and say that with a little bit of education and learning, we can come of age and create a utopian society. That was the mindset that held sway in academia at the beginning of the 20th century. And the 20th century was the era that gave us two world wars, the Holocaust, atomic weaponry, and ethnic cleansing among other things. The human race certainly didn’t come of age during the 20th century. Contrary to that utopian mindset, the Bible teaches we’re all sinners separated from God, dead to our sin, and unable to help ourselves. It doesn’t make us feel good and then say, “Just try harder and gain a bit of insight and you’ll be OK.” It says, “There’s no difference, for we’ve all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” In other words, we’re all in the same boat. We’ve all fallen short. We’re all broken. The only difference is some of us know it and some of us don’t.
How did God’s will unfold in Joseph’s life? As we work our way through Genesis 37, there’s an interesting progression. One of the first things we notice is that Joseph stood out because of his values:
Joseph, a young man of seventeen, was tending the flocks with his brothers, the sons of Bilhah and the sons of Zilpah, his father’s wives, and he brought their father a bad report about them. (Genesis 37:2, NIV)
Undoubtedly Jacob knew some of his sons were scoundrels, so he dispatched Joseph to check on them. And when Joseph reported to his father what he observed, he wasn’t being a snitch or blabbermouth. He was simply being responsible and doing as his father asked.
There’s a sense in which Joseph had been marked out at an early age. If you read on, the account reveals that he’d been given a richly embroidered robe by his father—a gesture that signaled to his brothers that he was set apart in his eyes. And to reinforce his status, he had a couple of dreams that, perhaps unwisely, he shared with his brothers. In the first dream, he and his brothers were gathering bundles of wheat in a field when his bundle stood up and the others bowed down before it. Needless to say, his brothers weren’t enamored with what he shared. His second dream was even more grandiose—the sun, moon, and eleven stars bowed down before him—a divulgence that created an increasing downward spiral of disdain and animosity toward him on the part of his brothers.
Again, there’s a lesson we can learn that frequently applies to our lives: Quite often those closest to us will not recognize God’s call upon our lives. One of my good friends during seminary came from a non-Christian family and went into pastoral ministry. He was very gifted and effective, but his family thought he was absolutely throwing his life away and would someday wake up and discover he needed to get a “real job.” That’s somewhat the case here. Although his dad conferring favored status on Joseph created animosity in the hearts of his brothers, there was also a sense in which he’d been marked by God as evidenced by those dreams. But those closest to him couldn’t see it or recognize it—in fact, his brothers ended up committing a heinous act because of it.
Their initial plan is to kill him and, when they see him coming, they overwhelm him and throw him into one of the nearby pits. And then we see an unbelievably cold-hearted act:
So when Joseph came to his brothers, they stripped him of his robe—the ornate robe he was wearing—and they took him and threw him into the cistern. The cistern was empty; there was no water in it. As they sat down to eat their meal, they looked up and saw a caravan of Ishmaelites coming from Gilead. Genesis 37:23-25a, NIV)
While Joseph is undoubtedly screaming his lungs out and crying for help, his brothers sat down and ate lunch—no doubt mocking their little brother and laughing callously all the while. As the story continues, a group of desert traders came along and they came up with a plan that would make them some money and ease their consciences by sparing his life: “Lets sell him as a slave!” One thing leads to another and, before too long, they’ve pocketed a little cash and Joseph is on his way to Egypt.
Just one remaining detail: What do they tell their father when he didn’t come home? Coming up with a plan to cover their deception, they took his multi-colored coat, dipped it in blood, and gave it to their father claiming he’d been mauled by a wild animal. Jacob had to choice but to believe it.
What a heartless, messed-up, and sordid set of events. And where is God in the midst of this fiasco? It shouldn’t come as any surprise that God is never mentioned anywhere in the chapter. Should we conclude that He abandoned Joseph and left him deal with his brothers’ evil schemes as best he could? My guess is it felt that way to Joseph. He had every reason to feel betrayed and victimized. But I’m also convinced that, while God had nothing to do with the events that played out—he didn’t authorize, sanction, or endorse what his brothers did in any way—Joseph was, at a level far beyond what we can understand, exactly where God wanted him to be. While this chain of events must have seemed dark, chaotic, and utterly confusing to him, they were serving to place him precisely where God wanted him to be. Behind Jacob’s favoritism, those strange dreams, and his brothers’ evil schemes, the God of the universe was working out His will.
Granted—it’s easy to reach that conclusion when we know how the story ends. But I find comfort in that because rarely do I see the big picture of how God’s at work in my life … and what little I do understand typically happens as I look back and see how the pieces came together. Hopefully that awareness of God’s ability to bring his hidden blueprint for our lives to pass can sustain, bolster, and carry us when we find ourselves in the midst of circumstances we didn’t choose, conditions we don’t want, and situations we didn’t ask for.
At the beginning of Genesis 37, Joseph is tending the flocks with his brothers who despise him. At the end of the chapter, he’s in route to Egypt as a slave—distanced from the father who loves him and totally on his own. Is he better off or worse off? The answer to that question depends on your point of view and how big your concept of God is.
Which brings us back to the words of Mark Twain: “There are two great days in a person’s life—the day we’re born and the day we discover why.” So—do you know why you were born? I believe you were born to serve God and bring glory and honor to Him. Focusing on yourself—fixating on your goals, ambitions, dreams, and future—will never reveal your life’s purpose. And it's never going to bring fulfillment. Life is about letting God use us for His purposes, not about us using Him for ours. We were made by God and for God, and until we understand that life won’t make sense. It is only in God we discover our origin … identity … meaning … purpose … significance … and destiny. Everything else is just details, and every other path leads to a dead end.