Consider especially his parable of the rich fool as found in Luke 12:16-21: And he told them a parable, saying, “The land of a rich man produced plentifully, and he thought to himself, ‘What shall I do, for I have nowhere to store my crops?’ And he said, ‘I will do this: I will tear down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, “Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.”’ But God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ So is the one who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God.” We all need to learn from this story and take it to heart. Will you make it through the night?

In the 1995 song “Days Like This” by Van Morrison we find this refrain: “Oh my mama told me, There’ll be days like this”. We all can have them. It might be a quite shocking or hardcore day that we did not see coming and was quite unexpected. My recent reading reminded me of this reality.

Now and then something I read will jump off the page and really impact me. What might seem like a rather ordinary and unexceptional sentence really struck me when I read it last night. I refer to Richard Phillips’ new 2-volume, 1400-page expository commentary on Genesis (P&R, 2023). I was reading his remarks about the Joseph story.

You would know it well. Except for chapter 38, the last 14 chapters of Genesis all revolve around Joseph. That is a full quarter of the entire book. In this narrative we clearly see the providence of God throughout. What people planned for evil, God planned for good (Gen. 50:20).

The sentence he had penned which grabbed me was this one: “Like Joseph, none of us knows what any given day will bring” (Vol. 2, p. 330). Yes, it is rather obvious, but still… Most of us wake up each morning fully expecting the day to go like most of our previous days. We usually do not expect that any major, dramatic event will occur.

Joseph would have woken that morning like most others, yet by the end of the day he found himself heading off to Egypt, sold as a slave – all because of his brothers’ intense dislike of him. Wow, I bet you he didn’t see that one coming! Talk about your day not exactly going as you expected it would!

My Own Story

Most of us might have days like this. When people ask me about my testimony, I have to say that what happened to Joseph sorta happened to me one day. No, I was not sold into slavery and bundled off to Egypt. But it was still quite a radical and unexpected day.

The day was August 15, 1971 – it was the day I became a Christian. There I was that morning, minding my own business and doing more of the same of what I had been doing for quite a while. I woke up and drove with a friend from my hometown in Wisconsin to Madison. I often enjoyed going to Milwaukee or Madison to get some new rock albums (although they could be found in Sheboygan).

I bought three albums that day – two of them which I still remember. One was a new Moody Blues album. I also scored some more dope – a bag of psilocybin (magic mushrooms). We got back home, and I jumped on my bike to ride to some friends’ place to do what we did just about every day: listen to rock albums and take a lot of drugs.

But I never got to hear those albums nor take that dope. But I wrote all this up before, so if you don’t mind, let me share some of that here:

Cheryl, a hippy girl that I had known well, was with a few others, driving down the street in the opposite direction.

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