Our scattered pieces knit together again
Genesis 46:3
God said, “I am the God of your father. Don’t be afraid of going down to Egypt. I’m going to make you a great nation there. I’ll go with you down to Egypt: I’ll also bring you back here. And when you die, Joseph will be with you; with his own hand he’ll close your eyes.”
God is speaking to Jacob here—Jacob who is old and weary. Following Joseph’s revelation to his brothers, Jacob’s entire clan is invited to live in Egypt, where there is food in the midst of famine, where they will be protected by Joseph’s influence.
But Jacob has had more than one tragic event in his life where there is, as Kate Bowler and Jessica Richie describe in their book Good Enough, a distinct “before” and “after”—and in the after, something has been lost forever. For Jacob, there was the time he fled his home, running from his brother Esau. Then there was the death of his beloved wife Rachel in childbirth. Finally, there was the loss of his son Joseph who mysteriously disappeared one day—a loss no less unthinkable and seemingly unsurvivable in ancient times than it would be today.
So we can understand why Jacob’s trauma has made him deeply afraid to leave the home that he has known and to risk more loss. But God is showing up here to say this will be another defining event, but loss won’t follow. Instead, the scattered pieces of Jacob’s life will be knit together again.
I confess this is one of the great yearnings of my life— that all the lost parts of myself, that the identities that simply faded away or were taken from me could be, not restored exactly, but reconciled with my present self.
Sometimes we get lucky and this knitting together happens in small ways. The morning I first wrote this Facing Fear post, I watched a church service online from the church community I attended while I lived in Salt Lake City. It was their first live-streamed service in many months, and seeing the familiar faces of my friends there, I experienced a kind of knitting together of my disparate selves, the Susan who lived in Salt Lake, seeking to heal from deep loss, and the Susan back in Idaho, still healing, but transformed from my year away.
God knows that Jacob—that we—long to be whole, to be reconciled to each other and to ourselves, to our past lives and the ones we still dare to hope for. For this to happen, we need someone to know us completely, to have witnessed and stood by us during all those past lives.
I love that God is showing up in this instance of “Don’t be afraid” to say our greatest defining losses are not the last word on our lives. I love that God is showing up to say to Jacob, and to us, that God can take the gashes, rips, and tears and knit us back together again. I love that God is saying: Trust me, please. Trust me to the very end.”
Hopeful. Thank you Susan