Verse of the Day for October 5

Joseph is in prison for something he did not do. He interprets a dream correctly for a fellow prisoner, and he asks for one thing in return: when you get out, remember me. Mention my name to someone.

The man gets out. Everything Joseph said would happen happens exactly as he said it.

The chapter ends there. The next chapter opens by telling us it was two full years.

Two years is not a literary device. It is seven hundred and thirty mornings of waking up in a prison you should not be in, having done the right thing, for a man who owed you and forgot.

Nothing in the text suggests Joseph handled this beautifully. It simply does not tell us. What it tells us is that the forgetting was real, the delay was long, and the position he was eventually given required him to be exactly where he was when the call came.

Being forgotten by someone who owed you is its own particular wound, and it is worse when you did the right thing to earn the debt.

The two years were not empty. They were just unexplained until much later, and Joseph lived every one of them without the explanation.