"And now do not be distressed, or angry with yourselves, because you sold me here; for God sent me before you to preserve life."-Genesis 45:5

"That's not fair!" If you are a parent, how many times have you heard your child protest with these words? And our response is, "No, life is not fair; and the sooner you accept that fact the better off you'll be."

Although I believe that response to be true, there is a better response, a more faith-filled response that we ignore to our well-being. That response was Joseph's response in our Old Testament reading for today. Years earlier, his brothers, in a pique of jealousy, had sold Joseph as a slave to some traveling Midianites and told their father that a wild beast had killed Joseph. In our reading, the brothers have come to Egypt because of the famine in the land and were searching for grain. They had heard that Egypt had stockpiled grain for the previous seven years in anticipation of a coming drought.

Now they discover that the brother that they had sold into slavery is now the Prime Minister of Egypt, the Pharaoh's right hand man! Ah, revenge is sweet!

But Joseph did not drink that sweet poison of revenge. He seems to have understood what St. Paul also understood when he wrote his letter to the Roman Christians who were undergoing persecution under Nero at the time: "We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose." (Romans 8:28)

Yes, bad things happen to good people. Good people lose their jobs through no fault of their own. Undeserving people get hurt in traffic accidents. Family members and friends take ill and die.

The wrong answer to such tragedies is responses such as: "Hmm, I wonder what they did wrong," or "I told him/her to quit smoking," or "God wanted another angel in heaven," or "God knows what he is doing."

C.S. Lewis says that it is the mark of an all-powerful God to create creatures who do things contrary to his will. Not all bad things that happen to us is God the author of. We want God to be a deus ex machina from a Greek tragedy to come down and     deliver us from the tragedies of life.

But God is in the redemption business, not the prevention business. God promises us his presence, not always his solution. When the God-Man Jesus was crucified, he took all the sin of the world upon himself and somehow redeemed it. So, our sufferings are not meaningless. We are not alone in the randomness of the universe.

And we don't need to exact revenge, either.

   Neal+