Sunday Afternoon Tea - Creating our own places of Goshen

If you were to tell someone who knows little about the Bible that there is a story about a very dysfunctional family where one of the teenage sons shows off a special gift from his father to his half-brothers and then tells them about a dream that they will someday bow to him, then they throw him in a pit but decide instead to make a profit and sell him into slavery... the person would probably doubt that it is the Bible.

However, if you go ahead with the story and tell them the story of the teenager who becomes a young man put in charge of the household but is set up with a false accusation of rape, gets sent to a prison, and stays there until the Pharaoh has a dream and someone remembers this young man can tell what dreams mean, so he goes to see Pharaoh, tells him what the dream means, and is made second in command of the foreign country... no one would believe that.

But wait, it gets better!  Eventually his brothers who sold him into slavery make their way to that country because of a famine in the land and long story short, find out the person in charge of the food supply is the brother they sold into slavery (we are doomed, I am sure they thought), the person to whom we are telling the story would probably get up and leave at that time. 

But it has a very unlikely happy ending and the young man forgives his not-so-kind brothers and brings his entire family, including his beloved father and brother, to the foreign land where the Pharaoh allows him to give the family prime real estate to settle in.  What an unlikely, strange, upside down story... but it is true.

I have learned so many lessons from the story of Joseph through the years, stories of forgiveness, provision, God's forming Joseph into a man of great character and incredible leadership skills, etc.  But this week, God showed me something else that is part of this story, something I hadn't thought about until now.

I was thinking how crazy the world is, how dark it is getting, and how necessary it is to have places of light (God's light) around me to prevent the darkness from creeping into my everyday living experiences.  When I was pondering this, I heard that Still Small Voice tell me that I needed to create Goshen.

To be honest, I had to look it up because while I knew it had to do with where the children of Israel settled in Egypt, I hadn't thought much more about it.  But as I did, I realized that in the midst of a pagan country, God's people were given a great gift.  Not only a place to settle and grow crops but a place where for most of their 400 years they stayed there, it was a place of protection for them... a kind of grace.

It also tells of the Pharaoh's fondness for Joseph because Goshen was near enough to where Joseph and his family lived that he could see his father and family often, while keeping the "foreigners" away from the ability to influence the Egyptians (and visa versa from God's perspective).

Of course, if you know the whole story, after 400 years God sent Moses to lead them out of Egypt.  By that time, there was a change in the leadership of the country that made things very hard for them and as we would later find out... by that time they also had a lot of the ways of Egypt in them that God took 40 years and the death of a generation to remove.

But what God was showing me in my pondering this week was not what would happen hundreds of years from when the family went to Egypt but what it was like when they arrived and how that relates to what I was pondering last week.  

We are not in the Promised Land, yet.  But we are also no longer in a land that we recognized and loved for our entire life.  We have been exiled against our will, living in a world that looks more pagan than I ever expected to see in my lifetime.  Not in my wildest imagination.  To make it even worse, the changes seemed to happen overnight, although I know the enemy of our souls has been setting all this up for millennia.

God reminded me that just as that family and everyone who came with them had been given the gift of Goshen, He gives each of us the ability to create our own place of refuge, too. Goshen may be an actual place or something we enjoy doing.

I think it will look different for each of us in many ways.  For some of us, we will keep tweaking our homes to make them places of peace and beauty. I am often thinking of ways to make our home more peaceful in the way it looks.  Even placing all the deck flowers where I can see them out the kitchen window. They bring the greatest joy when doing dishes.

For some of us, we will make a corner of a room a peaceful place with favorite artwork, books, and a good pair of ear phones so we can listen to music or audio books.  Part of my place of peace definitely includes a DVD collection of favorite movies that make me feel all warm and cozy.

Most of us will have a place for our Bible and notebook and if you are like me, you have a couple Audible Bibles and a Bible app.  I have no excuse for not hearing the Word each day.

When I thought of individual  places of Goshen, I thought of Leota's Garden by Francine Rivers.  The garden was the place of healing and grace for Leota, whose life had been very difficult.  Many gardeners find their peace while planting and pruning, weeding and harvesting.

For some people, it is not a place but a feeling that comes when they create paintings or make music.  For me, there have been times when I lost myself in the process of chopping vegetables, making soup, or bringing all the ingredients together to make a cake or cookies.

I have known people who feel closest to God when hiking in a forest or feeding their horses.  I have known many farmers who feel their most peaceful when looking at a healthy crop in the fields.  Sometimes we truly do find a place of Goshen in nature if that is the way God made us.

Definitely I see that while Goshen will usually be a place where we find peace and meet with God, it can also be when we lose ourselves and cast away our worries by emerging ourselves in a creative process.  Which makes sense for we are created in the image of a Creative God.

I know for many women of prior generations, their kitchen was a place of Goshen.  It was their domain, their place to create and to talk to God.  The kitchen was not a place to come home to after eight or nine hours of "real work", to quickly throw together some food or put take out on plates.  It was a place of respite.

I am convinced that if we ask God what can be our Goshen, if we are not aware of what it is already, He will tell us.  In the months and the years ahead, we will all benefit from having such a place in our lives so that we can be refreshed and grow in Christ.  Perhaps then, we can be a refuge to others who do not know Him.

Mentioned in this Blog Post

Leota's Garden by Francine Rivers... here.

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Image: Grandma's Garden by Robert Duncan