Twenty pieces of silver was what Joseph's brothers decided he was worth to them. He was not a stranger, neither was he an enemy to them. Betrayal from an enemy is painful, but betrayal from someone who knows you is something that settles into a different part of you entirely

Some stories are too painful to have made sense while they were happening. Joseph's brothers stripped him of his favourite coat, threw him into a pit, and sold him into slavery, all before he turned eighteen.

You may not have been told by anybody that following God could lead you somewhere this quiet and this dry

There is a father in Mark 9 who brought his son to Jesus after years of watching him suffer with no relief in sight. When Jesus told him that all things are possible to him who believes, the man's response was not a confident declaration. It was something far more honest.

In Part 1 we said something that might still feel hard to fully accept. Starting over is not proof that you failed. It is often proof that God is calling you somewhere new, but knowing that in your head and knowing what to actually do with your hands are two very different things.

Starting over has a particular kind of weight to it. It does not just feel like a loss but an evidence. Evidence that you made the wrong choices, that you missed something, that the people who doubted you were right all along.

You have been praying, reading your Bible, going to church, doing all the things you were told to do as a believer, and yet somewhere along the way, your dreams stopped feeling alive.

Do you know there is something about waiting that does something to you? It is not the brief kind of waiting, like a few minutes for a reply or a few days for a result. The deep kind, that kind where months turn into years, where you have prayed the same prayer so many times that you can barely bring yourself to say it again.

You have heard all the right things from all the right people and not one word of it has landed. You have prayed and felt nothing. You have waited and received nothing and somewhere along the way, you stopped being angry about it.

You stopped answering your phone a few weeks ago not because anything dramatic happened neither was it because there was one big moment you could point to. You just got tired. Tired of pretending things were fine when actually they were not.