Joseph's résumé for these chapters reads: enslaved, falsely accused, imprisoned, forgotten. The narrator's refrain over the same years reads: the LORD was with Joseph.

Both lines are true at once. That is the tension most believing lives are lived inside, the long stretch where faithfulness has no visible payoff. Today you get to watch someone inhabit it with integrity, and learn how he did it.

Joseph never got to read his own story's ending, and the middle chapters gave him no evidence a reader would envy: the reward for integrity was prison, and the reward for helping the cupbearer was two years of being forgotten. What he had was the refrain. The LORD was with him, in the house, in the dungeon, in the waiting.

The sower's parable explains why some people hold on through chapters like that: good soil is not the absence of trouble; it is depth. Shallow faith sprouts fast and dies at the first hot afternoon. Let today's word get roots into you, past the thorns of worry and wealth, and hold the refrain through your own middle chapters.