PART 4 – EXPLORE THE VISUAL IMAGERY
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Chapter 19 - PHARAOH'S DREAMS (Joseph episode 8)
So let’s move straight on to the next episode of the Joseph story.
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Two years have passed since Joseph interpreted the dreams of Pharaoh’s cup-bearer and baker. Just as Joseph predicted, the baker was brought out of prison and put to death. But the cup-bearer was restored to his former position, and served Pharaoh as he had before…
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We pick up the story at Genesis 41:8.
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Prison to Prime Minister (from Genesis 41:8-57)
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I had just about given up on any hope of freedom from prison. Pharaoh’s cup-bearer was my best hope, but nothing came of my request – until two whole years had passed from the time I had interpreted the dreams of Pharaoh’s Butler and Baker.
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And then, one morning, I was surprised by the prison warder, who came to tell me that Pharaoh himself required my presence at the palace. At first I had no idea what was going on – was this good news?... or was it bad?!
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As I found out later, Pharaoh had woken up that morning very upset and disturbed, because he had had strange dreams during the night (just like his Butler and Baker! I’d been here before.) Pharaoh called for all his magicians and wise men, but none of them could tell him what the dreams meant.
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When the chief cup-bearer heard what was going on, he finally remembered me. He went to Pharaoh and said to him:
"Your majesty, I’ve just remembered something that I should have told you about a long time ago. Remember when you were angry with the chief baker and me, and you put us both in prison. One night the baker and I each had a dream, and we didn’t know how to interpret the meaning. But there was a young Hebrew fellow with us in the prison who had been a slave of the captain of the guard. We told him our dreams, and he told us what our dreams meant. And what’s more, everything happened just as he had predicted. I was restored to my position as chief cup-bearer, and the baker was executed."
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So, Pharaoh sent for me at once. No way was I in a fit state to appear before Pharaoh, but I was given the chance to clean up, to have a shave and put on a clean change of clothes, then I was taken to the palace, and presented before Pharaoh.
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Pharaoh said to me,
"I had strange dreams last night, and no one can tell me what they mean. But I hear that you have the gift of interpreting dreams."
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So I replied,
"Your Majesty, it is beyond my power to interpret your dreams. But God can tell you what they mean and set your mind at rest."
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So Pharaoh continued,
"Well, I dreamed that I was standing on the bank of the Nile River, and I saw seven fat, healthy cows come up out of the river, and they began grazing on the reeds and grasses along the river bank.
But then I saw seven other cows coming up from the river. These were sick-looking cows, scrawny and thin. I've never seen such ugly, scrawny-looking animals in all the land of Egypt. These thin, scrawny cows swallowed up the seven fat cows. But afterward they were just as thin and scrawny as before! Then I woke up.
After a while I fell asleep again, and I had another dream. This time I saw seven ears of grain, full and healthy, growing on a single stalk. Then seven more ears of grain appeared, but these were diseased, shrivelled and blasted by the east wind. The shrivelled ears of grain swallowed the seven healthy ears.
I told these dreams to the magicians, but none of them could tell me what they mean."
With God’s help, I was able to give him this reply,
"Your majesty, both of your dreams mean the same thing. God is telling you in advance what he is going to do. The seven healthy cows and the seven healthy ears of grain both represent seven years of plenty.
The seven thin, scrawny cows that came up later and the seven thin heads of grain, blasted by the east wind, represent seven years of famine.
The meaning of your dreams?... The next seven years will be a time of great prosperity throughout the land of Egypt. But afterward there will be seven years of famine so great that all this prosperity will be forgotten. The reason you had two similar dreams is to emphasize that these events have been decreed by God, and they will soon come to pass.
So, your majesty, I suggest that you should find an intelligent and wise man and put him in charge of the entire land of Egypt. Then you should appoint supervisors over the land and let them collect one fifth of all the crops during the seven years of plenty and store it up so that there will be enough to eat when the seven years of famine come."
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I was taken aback by Pharaoh’s response – and that of Pharaoh’s court. Pharaoh asked his officials,
"Can we find anyone else like this man who is so obviously filled with the spirit of God?"
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Then Pharaoh said to me,
"Since God has revealed all this to you, no one else is as intelligent or wise as you are. You will be in charge of my household, and all my people will take orders from you. I hereby place you in charge of the entire land of Egypt. Only I, Pharaoh, will have a rank higher than yours."
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Then Pharaoh removed his signet ring – his royal seal of approval – and placed it on my finger. He dressed me in fine linen clothing and hung a gold chain around my neck.
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He also arranged for me to ride in the chariot reserved for his second-in-command. And wherever I went, all the people were commanded to bow down before me.
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I was thirty years old when I began serving in the court of Pharaoh, the king of Egypt.
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As Pharaoh’s dreams had predicted, the next seven years produced bumper crops. I was empowered by Pharaoh to travel from one end of the country to the other, arranging for the crops to be gathered in and for the grain to be stored up in preparation for the coming years of famine. Huge amounts of grain were gathered in like sand on the seashore, until we had to stop keeping records because there was too much to measure.
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Pharaoh arranged for me to marry Asenath, the daughter of Potiphera, the priest of On. And before the first of the famine years arrived, we had two sons. I named my first son Manasseh (meaning “forgotten”), because I thought,
"God has made me forget all my past troubles and the grief I suffered from my family."
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I named my second son Ephraim (meaning “fruitful”), because,
"God has made me fruitful in this land where I’m an exile."
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In due course the seven years of plenty came to an end, and the seven years of famine began, just as God had shown me. When the effect of the famine began to take hold, the people cried out to Pharaoh for food. Pharaoh told the people,
"Go to Joseph, and do whatever he tells you."
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So I opened up the storehouses and started distributing grain to the starving Egyptians. People also came from all the countries around Egypt to buy grain because the famine was severe throughout that part of the world, including the land of Canaan, where my family lived…
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JOSEPH'S DREAMS
Obviously the most visual and imaginative sections of this passage are the descriptions of Pharaoh’s dreams. Note that, like Wordsworth’s poem, these descriptions reflect Pharaoh’s own personal experience. He is describing what he himself has seen in his dreams, and it is clear from the way he retells them that he has retained a very vivid image in his mind. There is one very telling sentence in Pharaoh’s description that shows how vivid and detailed his dream must have been.
“I've never seen such ugly, scrawny-looking animals in all the land of Egypt!”
Our aim in this study is to learn how to get inside Pharaoh’s mind – to imagine we are there, experiencing his dreams for ourselves, so that they become as vivid for us as they were for Pharaoh.
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Some years ago now we were privileged to be at a performance of the Gospel of Luke by Bruce Kuhn, a Broadway actor, and a vibrant Christian, who performs the entire Gospel of Luke as a one-man show. Kuhn faithfully sticks to the wording of the King James Bible, but with such expression and creativity that the message comes to life in a powerful way.
You can see an excerpt from his performance of the Gospel of Luke here...
or just search for Bruce Kuhn on YouTube.
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After seeing the performance, we attended a workshop that Kuhn gave to demonstrate his method of internalising and remembering the script for his performance. I had expected that the workshop would focus on methodology for learning the script, word by word, phrase by phrase, but nothing could be further from the truth. Most of the workshop time was geared to helping us use our creative imagination to be there in the story – asking questions that would help us imagine the scenes, enter the mind of the characters, bring the story alive.
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His point was that, even though the exercise made no difference to the sequence of words use to tell the story (which in his performance always remained true to the King James version), the more vividly he was able to imagine himself inside the story, the more vivid, dramatic and convincing the performance would become. Because once he had imagined himself inside the story, the story became his, not someone else’s. He effectively puts himself in the place of an eyewitness to the events he is describing, thus able to tell them as authentically and convincingly as if he has been there himself.
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Although you may have no intention to ‘perform’ the story to others (though if you can, this is a terrific evangelistic technique) going through this process will enable you to understand the story in greater depth, and to be much more engaged and emotionally impacted by the words themselves.
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So here are some suggestions, based on Bruce Kuhn’s methodology, for getting you inside Pharaoh’s mind and seeing what Pharaoh saw.
Seven fat cows, seven scrawny ones
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Although this exercise is aimed at encouraging your own creative imagination, it may help you to search on line for pictures of the river Nile (preferably in a rural setting rather than through the middle of Cairo or Luxor!) to give you some authentic idea of the geographical context and scenery as a basis for your imaginings. And pictures of Egyptian agriculture and cattle might also be helpful.
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So here are some questions as a starter to fire up your imagination. Use as many senses as you can to imagine yourself inside the dream, standing where Pharaoh is standing, seeing what Pharaoh is seeing.
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Start with the background scenery – visualise the river itself – the banks lined with reeds and water plants, giving way to grasses, and beyond that fertile fields growing grain, cotton, maybe figs or date trees. How wide is the river? What can you see on the opposite bank?
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Imagine the light – what time of day is it? Is the sun overhead, or providing softer morning or afternoon light with longer shadows? (Pharaoh would probably be used to taking his walks by the river in the cooler parts of the day.)
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Think about any sense of movement in the scene. What about the river? There would be strong current flowing at the centre; slower, stiller water towards the edges. Maybe the reeds are swaying in the breeze, and perhaps dragonflies and other insects darting backwards and forwards.
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What sounds might you hear?... the lapping of the water along the river bank?... bird songs?
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What about the musty smells of the river, the fresh grasses by the bank?
Once you are satisfied you can imagine the background scenery, set the story within this scenery.
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Imagine the seven fat cows coming up from the river… size, shape, colour…
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Do you imagine them standing in shallow water, then coming out onto the river bank? ... or do you imagine them dramatically appearing from under the water, horns breaking the surface, then ears, head, shoulders, the rest of the body?
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Do they come out side by side, or one after the other?
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Now follow the same imaginative process with the thin scrawny cows. Note Pharaoh’s personal comment that these were the “”
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How do you picture the seven thin cows swallowing the seven fat cows? Here you really need to let your imagination run riot!
Seven full ears, seven shrivelled ones
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Now repeat the process with the second dream. You are free to imagine some other grain than barley if you choose, but although the Hebrew text doesn’t specify what type of grain, I suggest that barley is a fairly safe bet.
Note that the seven good ears all grow from the same stalk (and we may assume that the seven shrivelled ears also grow from the same stalk, though not necessarily the same one as the good ears).
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The difference between the full ears and the shrivelled ears is described in very dramatic language. You might want to look at actual images of a healthy harvest of grain, and at the effects on the harvest caused by severe drought (foreseen by the phrase ‘blasted by the east wind’
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Again, let your imagination run riot in order to visualise the shrivelled ears swallowing the full ones.
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This kind of visualisation technique is used extensively by professional story-tellers. If you are interested in studying further, see Doug Lipman, Improving Your Storytelling, August House 1999, especially chapters 3-4.
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But this technique is just a first step to helping us move deeper into exploring the significance of the visual image. Once we have placed ourselves in Pharaoh’s shoes, and tried to imagine the dreams as Pharaoh imagined them, we can move on to asking ourselves:
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… what emotional response did the dreams produce?
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As we discussed in the previous chapter, our most vivid memories are generally accompanied by a deep emotional response. Ask yourself:
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Why was Pharaoh so disturbed by these dreams?
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Why was he so upset that no-one could tell him the meaning?
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What effect would these dreams have had on Pharaoh’s state of mind if Joseph had not been able to interpret them?
Which leads us on to the next obvious question:
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… what was the meaning behind the visual image?
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In this case, there is no doubt as to the meaning of Pharaoh’s dreams, since Joseph spells out very clearly the meaning that God intended. But in other cases (as we shall see shortly) we may have to dig carefully for the practical or spiritual meaning behind the visualisation.
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But there is one more step we need to take, as God’s intention in giving the dreams, and giving Joseph the interpretation, was:
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… what action may be needed to resolve the crisis which the dreams predicted?
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God was provided advanced warning of the coming famine, and give Pharaoh the opportunity to take practical steps in order to prepare for hard times, and ensure his people were protected from starvation.
So there is a progression which can be stated as follows:
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What outward images (signs or symbols) appear in the story?
--> What emotional response is produced by these images?
--> What is the symbolic meaning behind the images?
--> What practical response is indicated?
Having seen how this process works on the most obvious visual imagery in the passage, let’s turn to something that may not have been so obvious on first reading…
Joseph’s transformation – Prisoner to Prime Minister
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There is another very powerful set of visual imagery which is even more significant in terms of the overall development of the Joseph story. This is the visual transformation of Joseph from prisoner to Prime Minister.
Joseph’s physical appearance changes dramatically during the course of this passage, and his outward visual appearance represents a huge change in Joseph’s emotional and spiritual well-being, and his realisation of God’s plan and purpose for his life.
Joseph the prisoner
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Imagine Joseph’s physical appearance when he emerges from prison. There are some important clues in the story, concerning the need for Joseph to shave, and to put on a clean set of clothes in order to appear before Pharaoh.
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Use your imagination to add detail to the picture that this suggests…
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How would the years in prison have affected Joseph’s physical appearance?
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What would be the state of his clothing?
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How would he smell?!
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What would be his general state of cleanliness?
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What would this do to his sense of self-worth?... to his self-image?
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How might all this have affected his attitude towards God?
Joseph before Pharaoh
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Joseph needs to shave, presumably have a good bath, put on fresh clothes before he comes into Pharaoh’s presence, so already there is a significant change in his appearance.
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Visualise Joseph coming into Pharaoh’s presence. How does the picture change physically?
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How does the outward change in appearance reflect a change in Joseph’s attitude… his self-belief? (Bear in mind that Joseph would not yet know Pharaoh wanted to see him.)
Joseph promoted to Chief Minister
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Now jump to the picture of Joseph at the end of his audience with Pharaoh…
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What items of clothing does Pharaoh put on him?
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What do these items signify?
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Pharaoh decrees that Joseph will ride in his second chariot, and that all the people will bow down to him… how will these things affect Joseph’s sense of worth and value?
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How might they change his understanding of God’s purpose and plan for his life?
Joseph’s emotional response
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There is no doubt at all that this episode made a tremendous emotional/psychological impact on Joseph’s life – one which would vividly abide in his memory for ever after.
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These changes are reflected in the naming of Joseph’s two sons:
Joseph named his first son Manasseh (meaning “forgotten”), for he said,
"God has made me forget all my past troubles and the grief I suffered from my family."
Joseph named his second son Ephraim (meaning “fruitful”), for he said,
"God has made me fruitful in this land where I’m an exile."
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Joseph’s whole outlook has changed. He has put behind him all the negative experiences of the past and is now rejoicing in God’s purpose and blessing in the land where God has placed him.
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And of course, Joseph recognises that the architect behind his transformation from prisoner to Prime Minister is not Pharaoh, but God! Joseph tells his brothers, later in the story, “Don’t be afraid, for it was God who sent me here to Egypt, and promoted me to Prime Minister, in order that I should save you from the famine.”
Discerning the meaning
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Joseph not only, with God’s help, discerned the meaning behind Pharaoh’s dreams, but understood that God had engineered this transformation and promoted him to the highest position in Egypt, apart from Pharaoh himself, for a specific reason – that he should be the one to stand in the gap, to plan and prepare for the coming famine and save the people from disaster and starvation.
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I am reminded here of Nehemiah’s call to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem. Nehemiah began by interceding for the situation in Jerusalem and begging for forgiveness that no-one had undertaken the task of rebuilding the walls and restoring Jerusalem to its former state. And by the end of his prayer, Nehemiah has understood that God is calling him to volunteer for the job!
Following through with practical action
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Joseph doesn’t waste any time, but immediately begins the task of building storehouses and gathering in the harvests.
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Joseph travelled from one end of the country to the other, arranging for the crops to be gathered in and for the grain to be stored up in preparation for the coming years of famine. Huge amounts of grain were gathered in like sand on the seashore, until Joseph had to stop keeping records because there was too much to measure.
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So we’ve followed through the complete process: imagery, emotional response, meaning, practical application.
We began with the outward imagery of Joseph’s transformation, which can be an eye-opening experience in itself. But the appreciation of that initial imagery in the story can open the way to further insights and practical applications that we may never have seen if we had not started with the visual aspects of the passage.
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Questions for consideration or discussion
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We should finish this chapter by noting that the process can be applied in a personal way to challenge and impact our own spiritual life. Follow-up discussion questions might take the following format…
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In what ways do you empathise with Joseph in this story?
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Think of a time in your past when God changed the course of your own life in a practical way, like he did with Joseph.
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What do you remember most strongly about this experience? How did it affect you emotionally, how did it change your sense of self-worth?
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Did it give you a clearer view of God’s plan and purpose for your life?
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What have you done since then to follow up on your experience? How has it helped you to grow in your walk with God?
The ultimate purpose of learning to live in the story is to let the story live in us. How can we experience God, develop a closer relationship with God, learn to grow our relationship with him, in the way that Joseph did? Can we internalise the vision for ourselves? Can we allow it to have the same impact on us as it had for the characters in the story?
