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Joseph can teach us much about how to deal with the tangled threads of our own lives.
The football coach was to the point of exasperation: “Losing five games in a row is bad enough. But what really frustrates me is that we keep making the same mistakes over and over. We just aren’t learning anything!”
Wasting the pain of failure happens off the field as well. We can be slow to learn that was causes the most pain is not the initial loss or hardship but the failure to learn anything in the process. If we really believe that God is working all things for our good, then one of the great challenges is to allow hard, painful, and tear-filled experiences to be our teacher in the classroom of life.
The Old Testament character Joseph learned through extremely difficult circumstances how to overcome. It is my prayer that by examining his life we can learn some important lessons from him.
Bill Crowder joined the Our Daily Bread Ministries staff in 2001 after more than 20 years in the pastorate stretching from West Virginia to southern California to west Michigan. Over the years, Bill has spent much of his time in a Bible-conference ministry around the world, serving ODBM offices and their outreach to their local communities. Bill is a contributing writer for the Our Daily Bread devotional and has written many Bible study booklets for ODBM’s Discovery Series. He has also published a number of books with ODB Publishing, the latest being Wisdom for our Worries and Gospel on the Mountains. Bill also serves as a co-host with Mart DeHaan, Elisa Morgan, and Daniel Ryan Day on the “Discover the Word” podcast and daily radio program, heard throughout the U.S. and on more than 20 stations in Canada. On the personal front, Bill is now semi-retired and, with his wife, Marlene, lives in North Carolina.
