You Don’t Always Know Which Moment Is the Pivot
Yesterday I preached from Genesis 37, and one small detail in the story has stayed with me — not the famous coat, not the pit, not even the brothers. It’s a man with no name who shows up for about two verses and then disappears from Scripture entirely.
But without him, the whole story changes.
A long trip with nothing to show for it
Jacob sends his teenage son Joseph on what should have been a straightforward errand: “go check on your brothers, they’re grazing the flocks near Shechem”. Joseph sets off from Hebron — a journey of roughly 50 miles on foot. He arrives at Shechem. His brothers aren’t there.
At that point he has a perfectly reasonable exit. Mission attempted. Not his fault. He could have turned around and gone home.
If you have kids, you know exactly how that conversation would have gone. “I went, Dad. They just weren’t there. So much for that.”
Instead, an unnamed man finds him wandering in a field and says: “I heard them say they were going to Dothan.”
That’s it. That’s his whole role in this story.
We don’t know who he was. We know nothing about him. Some commentators think he may have been an angel given how providentially timed his appearance was. Genesis doesn’t say. What Genesis does tell us is that Joseph listened, turned north, and walked another ten or so miles to Dothan.
What happened next
His brothers saw him coming from a distance — probably that colorful coat giving him away on the horizon — and by the time he arrived, the plan to kill him was already forming.
They threw him in a pit. They sold him to slave traders passing through the equivalent of a laborer’s wages for 20 months. How they split the money, we don’t know. He was hauled off to Egypt as a slave, property of a man named Potiphar. Then Potiphar’s wife falsely accused him of assault and he was thrown in prison. Years passed.
From the outside, nothing about Joseph’s story looks like a success. Every decision point seems to lead somewhere worse.
Then Pharaoh has a dream no one could interpret. A former cellmate of Joseph’s remembers that Joseph had a gift for this sort of thing, so he is brought out of prison, interprets the dream, and within a day goes from prisoner to second-in-command of the most powerful nation on earth.
The dream predicted seven years of plenty followed by seven years of famine. Joseph spent the years of plenty storing grain. When the famine hit, people came from surrounding nations to buy food from Egypt — including, eventually, the very brothers who sold him.
Joseph reveals himself to them. They’re terrified. And he says something that has echoed through the centuries:
“You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good — to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.” (Genesis 50:20)
Imagine if he’d turned back at Shechem
No Egypt. No Potiphar’s house, which is where he developed administrative skill. No prison, which is where he met the men connected to Pharaoh’s court. No interpretation, no promotion, no grain storage, no salvation for a nation — or for his own family.
All of it traces back to one moment: a tired young man in a field with every excuse to go home, who listened to a stranger and kept walking.
What this means for you
Maybe you’re in a season where you’ve done the reasonable thing and it hasn’t worked out. You showed up where you were supposed to be and the opportunity wasn’t there. The deal fell through. The ministry didn’t launch. The business didn’t get traction. The door didn’t open.
And you’re standing in your own Shechem wondering whether to keep going or call it.
Joseph’s story doesn’t promise that obedience leads to comfort. His obedience at Shechem led to a pit. But it also led, eventually, to exactly where he needed to be to fulfill a purpose bigger than he could have imagined when he left home.
Sometimes the pivot point doesn’t look like a pivot point. Sometimes it looks like another ten miles in the wrong direction. Sometimes the long-term outcome doesn’t look like a good decision for years.
Here’s the other side of it: sometimes you’re not Joseph in this story. Sometimes you’re the unnamed man. You say something encouraging to someone — a word, a lead, a piece of direction you’ll forget by next week — and you have no idea you just sent them toward their destiny.
You don’t get to know which moments are load-bearing. You just get to choose whether to show up in them.
What’s a moment in your life where you almost turned back — and didn’t? Leave a comment below.
