Growing up, my kids totally enjoyed the music of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, based on the story of Joseph from the Bible’s Book of Genesis.
The production is almost entirely singing with very little dialog. The album was released in 1971 but the music caught on even more after the musical appeared on Broadway in 1982.
The theatre production focuses on the beautiful coat Joseph is given by a father to a favored son. Joseph’s 12 jealous brothers sell him to slave traders and bring home the coat with the blood of a goat and say that he had been killed.
Joseph ends up in an Egyptian prison and eventually before the Pharaoh because he is good at interpreting dreams. He rises in the ranks and is in charge of the stored-up grain when his brothers show up asking for help due to a famine in their country.
Joseph forgives them and Jacob arrives in Egypt with the technicolor dreamcoat.
The Broadway show is the story of a dreamer who survives the harshness of life. Tucked away in that Book of Genesis is, perhaps, one of the most compelling truths of the Bible about how good has a way of emerging despite the unhappy events of life.
It is Genesis 50:20, “What was meant for evil, God uses for good.”
I think the application is even broader. It’s not just how we turn lemon into lemonade or how when something bad happens something good can appear; it’s that you never see the complete picture of how the dots connect in life until the very end. So, be patient. Have hope.
Sometimes we fool ourselves into thinking that we control the events in our lives when all we really control is how we respond to those events.
It was Rumi who said, “Whatever happens to you, don’t fall in despair. Even if all the doors are closed, a secret path will be there for you that no one knows. You can’t see it yet but so many paradises are at the end of this path…Be grateful! It is easy to thank after obtaining what you want, thank before having what you want.”
I was educated in the management world where the mantra was, “He who fails to plan, plans to fail.” Life was about strategies and achievement.
