Who Owns the Dream

Thank you for being here.

I want to say a huge welcome to each one of you that are here.

And if you're watching online, those of you watching in Overflow, so grateful to have you here.

I'm eager to share God's word with you.

If you have your Bible, go ahead and turn to the book of Genesis.

I'm gonna make it easy on you.

We'll just go first book of the Bible, uh, Genesis.

We're gonna start in verse, uh, chapter 37.

If you if you don't have a your Bible on you, don't sweat it.

Uh it'll be up on the screen.

Uh and by the way, if you have a smartphone, you can have your Bible with you at all times.

There's a uh the Bible app.

You can download it.

Uh if you're killing time in the dentist office uh on your commute, it actually has an audible, audio version of the Bible as well.

You can listen to scripture on your way in.

So I want to let you know about that.

Anyway, Genesis 37, uh, we're gonna start in verse five.

It says one night Joseph had a dream, and when he told his brothers about it, they hated him more than ever.

Listen to this dream, he said.

We were out in the field tying up bundles of grain, and suddenly my bundle stood up, and your bundles all gathered around and bowed low before mine.

His brothers responded, So you think you'll be our king, do you?

Do you actually think you will reign over us?

And they hated him all the more because of his dreams and the way he talked about them.

Soon Joseph had another dream, and again he told his brothers about it.

Listen, I've had another dream, he said.

The sun, moon, and eleven stars bowed low before me.

This time he told the dream to his father as well as to his brothers, but his father scolded him.

What kind of dream is that?

Let's pray.

Lord, we come to you in Jesus' name.

We open up our minds and hearts to receive.

We think about the wise words of Jesus, who gave a parable of seed and soil, and the seed representing God's word, what God says, and the soil representing our hearts, how receptive are we to hear what you would have to say to us.

So, Lord, we know that your word is living and active.

It's like a living seed that produces fruit in our lives.

And we do our part right now to prepare our hearts to receive, to be receptive.

Lord, if you want to convict us, convict us.

If you want to confront us, confront us, if you want to encourage us, encourage us, Lord.

Help us to see what we need to see different, think how we need to think different, do what we need to do different.

In Jesus' name.

All God's people said amen.

In 1987, I was seven.

And I went into the family living room and up to our VHS player.

Anybody know what I'm talking about?

Anyone remember tapes?

Got me a VHS tape, January of 87.

I put it in and I hit record and I recorded Super Bowl 21.

Giants versus Broncos.

And this is back when I mean you recorded it off the TV.

And some of you had to you had to tape over stuff if you didn't have enough tapes.

You know what I'm talking about?

So I taped it, I taped the whole Super Bowl.

And I watched it over and over and over and over again.

Anybody remember like when there wasn't like accessible, like content accessible on demand?

You know, now it's like you go to Netflix, and if they didn't come out with three new movies last night, you're really ticked.

Um, because it's so accessible and you could get things on demand.

At that time, if you had a favorite movie, you watched it like 50 times.

You memorized it.

And I memorized Super Bowl XXI.

John Madden was calling it with Pat Summerall.

The the and I didn't even like either team.

I wasn't even like a Giants fan or a Broncos fan, but I remember Lawrence Taylor, I remember uh Carl Banks, Phil Sims, Joe Morris, uh I know some deep track players, Jim Burt.

You're like, who in the world is that?

He exists, Mark Bavaro, okay.

Uh I remember John Elway was on the Broncos, okay.

Carl Mecklenburg, I could go on and on.

The Giants won 39 to 20.

If you put that game on right now, honestly, I could pretty much quote the whole game.

And what happened at age seven is I had a dream.

And my dream was I wanted to play pro football.

You know, I did what kids do.

You look around at greatness, whatever you perceive greatness to be, and that becomes your prescription for your life.

This is what I want to be empowered, I want to do something great, I want to be, I want to make a great life.

And so to me, that was football.

So from that moment on, that's what I started preparing myself to do.

I played sports all the way through, and I was able to play in college.

I played at a small school.

Pretty quickly, I realized there was a it was a crazy long shot I would play in the NFL, but I thought maybe you know I can play professionally.

It was this dream that I had in my mind.

And and so I made all the way to 22 years old, my senior year, and and it was just being realistic, it was a long shot.

But when you're 22 years old, you're in the best shape of your life, you think, you know what?

If I'm in the right place at the right time, you know, if I I know it's it's not plausible, but it's not impossible.

And if I'm in the right place at the right time, I mean there are people that make it, you know, who came from small places, and I'm not gonna despise small beginnings.

If I ball out at the right time in front of the right person, all the everything falls together, I could maybe get a shot.

Well, it didn't work out like that.

Spoiler alert, I didn't play in the NFL.

And I remember getting to my last game, and it was crazy enough, like this dream that was still sort of there the whole time.

Maybe, maybe, maybe.

There was literally, I'm shaking hands with the team we just played at the last game of my senior year that I realized dream is dead.

There's no market for my skills, there's no demand for my supply, there's no opportunities for me, it's done.

And all of a sudden I realize, then I start thinking very specifically.

If I take, once I take these pads off, I'll never put them on again.

I started putting pads on mentally at seven years old.

I started literally putting them on at 10 years old.

Here I am at 22 years old, and I realized if I take them off, once I take these off, it's over.

And so I couldn't take them off.

I laid on the 50 yard line.

Everybody left the stadium.

I laid on the 50-yard line, looking up at the sky.

Pretty soon I hear some footsteps.

I look over as my coach.

And he laid with me on the 50-yard line.

We laid there, we looked up at the sky, and he gave me some encouraging words that to be frank with you, in that moment didn't mean much because I was in, I was, I was beginning to grieve.

I was beginning to come to reality like this dream is dead.

This thing that's been in my mind's eye since I was seven, it's not going to happen.

Come on down, come on down.

And it wasn't for lack of effort, it wasn't for sincere uh sacrifice.

I did all that I could do, it just wasn't for me.

And so he eventually got up and I laid there till dark.

When it finally got dark, I got up, I took my cleats off, tied them up, threw them over the goalpost, went to the locker room, took my pads off, and now I had to pivot.

What now?

What's next?

And I had to go through the process of grieving what I really wanted to happen.

Throughout life, we have to pivot.

Very rarely do you come up with a dream at seven and see it all the way to fruition.

Often you get going in a direction and things don't happen the way that you thought they were gonna happen.

How do you do this well?

For some of you, it's like a cool football story, but you didn't care about that.

Maybe for you it was uh it was an academic dream, maybe for you it was a parenting dream.

All I want to be is a dad, all I want to be is a mom.

Maybe for you it was a romance dream, it was something uh familial, maybe it was a career dream that you wanted to own your own business.

I want to own my own business, I want to be financially independent, I want to be an executive, I I want to I want to I want to climb to something like you had something that you were going for, and here you are, and dreams are dying.

How do we pivot throughout life?

You know, we we see this story, Joseph has this dream, and we know it was more than just uh you know what happens when you go to sleep.

You know, he's 17 years old, which means he had about 6,000 dreams.

And yet he has two dreams that he is locked in on that are his dreams.

Like he's like, this is no, there's more to this.

If you look at the Hebrew word for dream, it that what it uses here is it goes beyond just what happens when you sleep into a sense that this is a signal from God, this is something God's giving me.

And I think this is where we learn from Joseph something powerful, and I and it would be what I would call dream ownership.

Like whose dream is this?

Is this something that I really want, like a seven-year-old Greg Ford who wanted to be a football player because he thought it was cool.

That was my idea.

Or is this something that's like a download from God?

Like, I think this is more than just something I think is cool or something I think is powerful, or or the thing I set out to do when I was a kid because I looked at who was great and decided that's I want to be that.

This is something that is connected to the purpose of my life.

It gets down to dream ownership.

I want to start with like what your dream is, and we'll use dream, okay, be essentially what you're pursuing, what your vision for your life.

Start with this.

Who owns it?

Is this you?

Or is this something that you really sense is something God put in you?

That's not an easy answer.

You gotta kind of dig into it, but you better dig into it because there's a big difference between a God-given dream and a self-centered hallucination.

And a lot of people get very confused by God because they they misunderstand theologically the order.

Come on, down.

Come on down.

Okay, we we let's look at this.

Do you want to do great things through God or do you want God to do great things through you?

It's different.

I know it sounds the same, but it's different because it starts with who's determining great?

Whose purpose is this fulfilling?

Who's coming up with the plan?

Who is the one that's determining the destination?

And if it's like, no, no, no, God, I've got the plan.

I I've decided at seven.

I decided what I want to be.

I looked around and I saw what great was.

I defined it.

Now I just need you to provide.

I just need you to protect.

I just need you to bring the right alignment.

I just need you to bring me the cattle on a thousand hills.

I just need you to bring me the resources.

I just need you to knock down the walls.

I just need you to be the conduit to what I want.

Or am I going, God, what do you want to do with my life?

Lord, what do you have for me?

And so it starts with dream ownership.

You see, Joseph, by the way, he's this uncanny character because let's just real quick give the cliff note.

He's 17 years old when he has this dream.

He doesn't really know exactly what it means.

Okay, the sun, moon, and stars bow down.

And he by doing the math, he realizes that has something to do with him being elevated above his family.

So it's like the sun, moon, and stars bow down, and then it's like grain, bales of grain bowing down.

What exactly does that mean?

He doesn't necessarily know.

He knows it has something to do with being elevated above his family, but he doesn't know specifically like what job that is, what city that is, where this is gonna take me.

He doesn't have those specifics.

And what happens is he goes through a 22-year journey to find out what the dream means.

For 22 years, he doesn't know what it means.

And for 14, the first 14 of those 22 years, it's miserable, awful.

His brothers sell him into slavery to Egypt.

So he goes to Potiphar's house, this wealthy guy with this wealthy estate, and now he's in Egypt.

And in Egypt, he has to start developing hard skills and soft skills.

You're you don't even speak the language, dude.

He's got to go learn how to speak Egyptian.

He has to speak their language, he has to learn how to work with, to be a team player with a diverse group of people he's never been.

He's in a city he never thought about going to.

I don't want to go there.

He's in an environment that's oppressive and that he's not free.

And yet, within that, how do you respond with such maturity and presence of mind as what Joseph to maneuver his way up through there, to keep his attitude right, to keep from just falling into despair?

Because it feels like the exact opposite of the sun, moon, and stars bowing to you is you've been sold into bondage in a in a foreign land.

How would you not go and just shake your fist at God?

How would you not become so demoralized?

It gets worse from there because he, once he's actually, you know, turned turned the opportunity thing into the opportunity, um, somebody lies about him, accuses him of rape, he didn't do it, and yet now his good job is taken away, all of the fruit of his labor is taken away, his reputation has been besmirched, and now his freedom's taken away at a deeper level, he's sent to prison.

And while he's in prison, he bounces back again, and he ironically is being used in prison to interpret dreams when his dreams are unfulfilled.

God, what are you doing?

You got me helping people with their dreams.

Don't you remember that one you gave me?

And I still don't even know what it means.

But you've got me over here helping.

By the way, Joseph's name means God will add.

God will add.

And God was using Joseph to add to people.

He was using Joseph to add.

So he's how do you keep bouncing back though?

Like, how do you keep from being totally demoralized?

Like we read this, we read about a 14-year journey, you know, and we're just sitting here in the air conditioning in a free country, and we're sitting here, like, oh yeah, 14 years, 22 years, you didn't know what the dream meant.

Oh yeah, rah-rah.

No, seriously, think about that.

Things went from bad to worse, to worse, to worse.

How do you keep popping up?

How do you stay buoyant?

The way he did was it wasn't his dream.

He's going, look, I didn't dream this.

I this wasn't me.

God has something he's doing with my life.

God has a place he's taking me in my life.

And I have no idea what the sun, moon, and stars bowing means.

I don't know what this grain means.

I don't know what this vision means.

I'm not even going to try to prescribe it, but I'll know it when I see it.

And when I see it, I'll be ready and I'll seize it.

So you have to start with, especially if you find yourself getting really down emotionally, that you have a hard time being flexible, that you are hanging on to, you're hung up on what you've seen in your mind or the place you're trying to go.

You have to start with dream ownership.

Who owns this?

Is this the thing I decided I wanted to be?

This is the place I decided I wanted to go, or am I ultimately going to trust God with it?

What we learn from Him as well is it's it's really more about direction than destination.

Let me kind of go into that for a second.

Direction versus destination.

Um of the threats with a sermon like this is there's two things that can kind of be a threat to what I believe the word of God says and what God wants us to get from this.

The first is when you're talking about dreams and stuff, you can it can quickly go to platitudes.

So it can go into this, like, yeah, if you dream it, you can be it.

Shoot for the moon.

If you miss, you land among the stars.

Uh, you know, just just your dreams, just you dream, dream, and so it can go platitudes real quick.

Trust the process.

Trust the process.

You can go into that stuff, and the people just like, you know, it goes in one ear and out the other because it's it's it's platitudes.

The second threat with this is that if we don't talk about the fact that like all your dreams are, you know, the difference between self-centered hallucinations and God-given dreams, if we don't talk about the difference between that, people walk out with some real warp theology about what God is on the hook for.

So Romans 8 28, God causes all things to work together for the good of those who love him and are called according to his purpose.

Don't miss that last part.

Called according to his purpose.

So trust the process can kind of actually not always be the right advice because sometimes implied in trust the process is I've determined the destination and now I'm gonna trust the process to get me there.

I'm gonna deepen it a little bit.

I don't think it's trust the process.

Trust the purpose.

Trust the purpose.

If you've already determined the destination, what if that's not where God has you going?

What if it's not?

You just thought it was cool when you saw it.

You just wanted to be Lawrence Taylor and John Elway.

It's cool.

I understand.

There's nothing wrong with looking around and trying to see some great things and having a desire for fulfillment and a desire for great purpose, but don't confuse the destination with purpose.

And oftentimes people think, you know, trust the process, and the process is all about what to get me to this destination.

What if that's not your destination?

Don't trust the process, trust the purpose.

Embrace the process, do all the development you have to do, but it might be for a different place.

So let's think of it like this.

Let's look at Joseph and then let's do the story I mentioned to you.

I walk away at 22 years old with, you know, take my shoulder pads off.

Okay, Lord, what now?

A lot of it feels like a waste because, you know, I go from playing football to now, you know, I'm gonna pastor a church.

Those don't feel like they're in the same ballpark, right?

It's like, you know what, what do I do with this skill of hitting people?

You know, it's it's not useful anymore, you know, and everything I know about cover two and what I'm supposed to check into when they go into motion and like, you know, all this stuff.

Like, oh what what good is that?

Well, guess what?

When I was seven, I decided I wanted I had a dream.

And in that dream, I decided I was gonna develop discipline and I was gonna start training, and I was gonna get on a team.

And when I got on a team, I had a coach, and I had to learn how to take coaching, and I had to learn how to be resilient, and I and I had to learn how to develop maturity when I didn't play good to get back to work and play better.

I had to learn how to be positive with my teammates when they didn't play so good instead of getting down on them to help bring them up.

I had to learn how to be a teammate, I had to learn how to perform under pressure.

I had to learn how to show up to practice when I didn't feel like being there.

When it was a rainy day, I did it anyway.

When it was labor day, we labored.

You see what I'm saying?

You work when you don't feel like it.

You you you keep going.

I learned how to be resilient, how to develop a work ethic, all of this.

It's very relevant.

Now I'm not hitting people anymore.

And there's a lot of it that doesn't necessarily translate, there's a ton of it that does.

Think about Joseph.

Joseph, who grew up in a family where he was the center of the universe.

Remember this?

Says his father preferred him over his brothers.

Jacob has eventually 12 sons, at this time, 11 sons by four different women.

And so, why does he love Joseph the most?

His dad loves him the most for two reasons.

One, he was born to him in his old age, but number two, he was born to his favorite wife.

He was born to Rachel.

And so you think about this now.

You're Joseph, and you have a bunch of half-brothers.

You have no full brothers until Benjamin, who comes later.

But you have a bunch of half-brothers, and your half-brothers are sick and tired of seeing dad look at you with a different look in his eye.

They're sick and tired of dad giving you a coat of many colors and special treatment.

They're sick and tired of dad making you a 17-year-old supervisor of his older brother.

They're sick and tired of the fact that dad loves you because he loves your mom and he hates ours.

And he despises our moms, and he treats our moms like garbage.

And he acts like your mom hung the moon.

So now it's a rivalry within the whole family.

Now, how does that play out into Joseph?

He's a 17 year old kid that thinks the world revolves around him, which is why it said his brothers weren't even just upset.

About his dream, but how he talked about it.

How did he talk about it at 17?

The way you and I would talk about it if we thought the world revolved around us.

If we got the coat of many colors, if we got the cushy job, if we got to stay close to home, well, they went out and worked.

So what happens in the process is as he goes into Potiphar's house, Potiphar isn't giving you a coat of many colors.

Potiphar isn't letting you wake up when you feel like it.

Potiphar isn't giving you options of what you might feel like you want to do today.

Potiphar's not putting up with your bad attitude today.

He's saying, get in the game.

He's saying get back to work.

He's saying sun up to sundown.

So he develops a work ethic.

He learns that it's not all about him.

The world doesn't revolve around him.

He's learning how to work when he doesn't feel like it.

He's developing both hard skills and soft skills in Potiphar's house.

What happens when Potiphar's wife lies on him and says he, you know, raped her and his and his character is being assassinated?

He learned that sometimes people say stuff about you and it's not true and they get away with it.

And not everybody's gonna say nice things to you.

And sometimes people attack you with their words, and sometimes injustices happen and they think they got away with it.

And so now, even though you did the right thing, you end up in the wrong spot.

Or what feels like the wrong spot.

So then he goes to prison, and in prison, now he has even less freedom and he fights his way back.

Okay, listen, none of that's wasted.

You don't think that helped with his uh role when his purpose came to fruition, and he finds himself taking all of those skills and going and in a seven-year period working tenaciously and organizing food during a season of prosperity that would get them through the famine.

Twenty-two years it took him to develop all of those things that would that ultimately would serve him.

Look at this, verse 40, uh chapter 45.

Chapter 45 is when he discovers what the dream meant.

It says in Genesis 45, 4, he said, I'm this is when he reveals himself to his brothers.

So his brothers are going through a famine, they're starving, and they go to get food, and and they show up, okay, and they bow before him.

Look at this.

Well, let me back up.

No, uh Genesis 42 6.

Genesis 42.

It says, Since Joseph was governor of all Egypt and in charge of selling grain to all the people, it was to him his brothers came.

And when they arrived, they bowed before him with their faces to the ground.

This is 22 years after the dream.

Verses 8 and 9.

Although Joseph recognized his brothers, they didn't recognize him, and he remembered the dreams he had had about them many years before.

So he has this aha moment.

This is what it was.

And then look at this.

And when he reveals himself to his brothers, he said, I am Joseph, your brother, whom you sold into slavery in Egypt.

But don't be upset and don't be angry with yourselves for selling me to this place.

It was God who sent me here ahead of you to preserve your lives.

This famine that has ravaged the land for two years will last five more years, and there will be neither plowing nor harvesting.

God has sent me ahead of you to keep you and your families alive and to preserve many survivors.

So it was God who sent me here, not you.

I want you to get this, because your dream includes you, but it's not about you, it's bigger than you.

Your dream includes you.

You are necessary, you are important to it.

But the dream, if it's a God dream, it includes you, but it's not all about you, and it's way bigger than you.

The 17-year-old Joseph, when he's dreaming of the sun, moon, and stars, and it's all revolved around him, he thinks it's about him.

This is about me being glorified.

This is about me being elevated.

Why wouldn't you think that?

You're 17, and that's all that it's been.

After 22 years of being sold by his brothers, being in Potiphar's house, being in prison, and then being elevated, but elevation means you got to work your tail off for seven years to harvest and store.

After that whole process, he learned real quick it wasn't about him.

And by the way, by the time it got to where the dream made sense, he look at his words, what he says.

He goes, Don't even feel bad about it.

God sent me here so I could serve.

God sent me here so I could serve.

All of a sudden he realized what the dream was about.

It wasn't about this.

It was not about self-aggrandizement, it was not about elevating himself.

It was it was about, he said, I'm here so I could go ahead of you to make sure that you could eat.

It was here so I could meet needs.

God sent me here so I could meet needs.

God sent me here so that I could save you, so that I could save others.

So that I could put my work to work to serve the needs and to do something bigger.

Your dream is not about you.

It includes you, but it's not about you, it's about something bigger than you.

So what you have to do is focus on direction, not destination.

I know I'm talking to somebody today.

You have been frustrated because momming and daddying is not what you thought it was gonna be.

You've been frustrated because the family is not turning out the way you thought it would.

You've been frustrated because the business is not what you thought it was gonna be.

I heard somebody say the other day, they said, they said, somebody asked me what it's like to own a business, and they and they said, What it's like to own a business?

You drink a Red Bull to relax.

The business ownership's not the freedom you thought it was gonna be.

The the the the high position with the better pay isn't what you thought it was gonna be.

It and so when things are not, you know, it's not turning out the way that you thought, to be able to pivot to come back and say, this isn't my dream anyway, Lord, I I I put this in your hands.

It's not about me, it's it's bigger than me, and to focus on direction instead of destination.

I'll give you this this last thing.

I um I took a coaching class one time on how to coach creativity, how to coach creativity out of people to get them doing their best creative work.

And in the class, the facilitator he asked for a volunteer.

He's like, I'm gonna do a demo.

He asked for a volunteer, and this guy volunteered, and he said, Okay, he said, I want you to really be creative.

He said, I want I want you to as creatively as you can to describe a beautiful sunset.

And the guy's like, Well, he goes, That's easy.

He goes, I actually went to college in Florida in uh Lakeland, and I used to go to the beach all the time uh at sunset, and so he's like, you know, and he's describing the sand and the way the sand is and the way the sun's hitting the sand and then the ocean and then the colors as it goes down and he's describing the colors, and the ocean looks like glass, and he did a pretty good, pretty good job.

I mean, I I felt like I could see what he was talking about, and uh he gets to the end, and and um the facilitator said, Did you guys did you guys catch that?

Did you see what happened?

He goes, I asked him to be creative, and he went to a memory.

He talked about where he's been and what he's seen.

He said, I'm gonna change the question, and with one question, I'm gonna I'm gonna flip the whole thing.

He said, I want you to as creatively as you possibly can describe a beautiful sunset on Mars.

Everybody kind of laughed and he's like, for real.

He's like, I'll wait.

Go ahead, do it.

And the guy kind of stammered around, he floundered around, he's like, Oh, I mean, uh there's caverns, um Martians, uh, you know, and and it was the it kind of turned funny, right?

And ironically, he kind of went to images of what he thought Mars might be like.

I wonder if the facilitator was talking to Joseph when he was 17 years old and said, Hey, what do you think the sun, moon, and stars are about?

I don't think he would have talked about Egypt.

Because Egypt was Mars.

I'm gonna go to a foreign place, I'm gonna learn a foreign language, I'm gonna go do this.

He had no concept.

He certainly wouldn't have said, I wanted to go work for Potiphar.

He certainly wouldn't have said, you know, I'd like to do a little time in prison.

He certainly wouldn't have done any of that.

But what if you're so fixated on the destination of what you think God is taking you to, and you're so frustrated and hung up on how it didn't go well that you're missing where God wants you to go?

Because it might be a sunset on Mars for you, it might be Egypt for you, God might be taking you somewhere.

And if you try to get too decisive and too prescriptive around what the sun, moon, and stars mean and what the you know, bales of grain mean and all of this, you might limit your life to what you can see and where you've been, and who you've met, and what languages you currently know, and what environments you feel comfortable in.

He would have never sent himself to Egypt.

It took the rejection of his family, it took an unenviable situation to get him to Egypt to get him to purpose.

Trust the purpose.

Trust the dream ownership.

God, this is your dream.

If it's your dream, then I know you're gonna bring it about.

And I know when it's time for me to know what the sun, moon, and stars mean, I'll know it.

And then I'll seize it.

Until then, I'm gonna be buoyant and I'm gonna bloom where I'm planted, and I'm I'm gonna treat everything I have as an opportunity.

And I'm I'm gonna use my name.

God will add.

I'm gonna add value, I'm gonna help people with their dreams, even though I'm frustrated about mine.

And so to if it, God, if it's not your plan, if it's mine, I don't want it anyway.

I want what you have, I want what you have.

I want you to do great things through me.

And so, dream ownership, start there and pick direction instead of destination.

I'm gonna keep moving in the right direction.

I'm gonna keep moving in the right direction.

I'm gonna keep walking through the doors God opens, I'm gonna keep thanking him for the doors that he closes, I'm gonna keep moving in the right direction.

And trust that the dream God has for you, it includes you, but it's not about you, it's bigger than you.

Let's pray.

Lord, we come to you in Jesus' name.

Lord, I love the way that your word will hit us in the right way at the right time.

I pray for those today, Lord, who are in a pivot.

It might be a pivot in their personal life, a pivot in their professional life, it might be grieving a plan, something that they thought was great.

Lord, maybe the their version of the 1987 Super Bowl and what that meant for their future.

Maybe they had a very sincere desire to just make their life count.

And yet, Lord, it might have been the thing that got them up and moving.

Got the thing that got them working towards education and working towards discipline and working towards developing themselves, and yet, Lord, it may not be what you have for them.

So, God, I pray in this moment, even in how we feel about you and how we feel about life, that we would develop a sense of flexibility that's rooted in a deep faith.

That Lord, although Potiphar's house doesn't look like your will, although prison doesn't look like your will, although Egypt doesn't look like your will, Lord, we trust that what you're doing includes us, but it's not about us, it's bigger than us.

Lord, may we have the same attitude that Joseph had.

Even those who had done him wrong, even those that had sent him in a direction that he didn't like or appreciate at the time, to be able to have the presence of mind to step back and to appreciate, Lord, the ways that you use and cause these things to work together.

And so, Lord, even with that, I pray that you would stir up hope and confidence, Lord, in each person who is pivoting today.

We love you, we praise you, we thank you.

In Jesus' name.

Everybody said amen.