I find myself wondering now, when I hear you repeat it and I'm re-living it in my mind, somewhere along
the line, he picked up the truth, that God is in charge of his life, because he doesn't fight
Potiphar, when Potiphar believes his wife, he doesn't fight the system when he
gets in the prison, he doesn't hate the man that forgets him. He doesn't go after the cupbearer.
He doesn't. And then, when he emerges, he doesn't say, "Now's my chance to get
back at this guys." There's none of that in him and you have to wonder, is it easier for
some than for others? And you've gone through times where you've felt awfully alone. Sure, haven't we
all? Sure. Even my coming to seminary, I look at the story of Joseph, even as we back up to
his dad, to Jacob, the deceiver, hard to know how much did Jacob tell Joseph? Obviously Joseph was
favoured, was special, we've already mentioned that and the whole story is birthed in success.
You have a large family, lots of children, Jacob is well off, he's been blessed, there's been some
healing with Esau, on that ongoing fight and it's out of the success comes this tale, this story,
and for me, it was very similar in my background. Well, my dad was a pastor, along the way we ended
up starting a manufacturing company, primarily by accident, all of the Lord and an interesting
story. While pastoring, also was in business. While pastoring and eventually the business grew
to the place where that wasn't anymore and was full-time in business, so when I was in high school,
I always kind of had my side job. I did Mcdonald's a little bit and was a paper boy but other than
that, I ended up working in our manufacturing company. It was a blessing, it helped me,
I went to a couple years of Bible College into university and so on and so forth. You have brothers,
sisters? I'm a middle child I have an older brother who's 18 months older and so him and I
were always involved in the business together and I have a younger sister, who's seven years younger so
while we were in high school and college, she's still growing up and living at home and
so on and so, in time our manufacturing company became successful. It was always small, it was
never on some kind of a massive scale but after 10 11 years of working and of growth, it became
very lucrative and I always think of it this way, I think there's two hard things to
deal with in life- failure and success. Both are hard and well, "I'd rather have success,"
You know, "Give me success and I'll learn the lesson. I'm happy," You look at
celebrities, you look at sports players and yes, you see their success or they're wealth
or whatever and I'd rather fail that way but that's not always as true, if you go through
that. As our business became successful, I watched our family fall apart and and in seeing that,
success in the eyes the world, business was growing, making a lot of money and so on, a
lot of travel in our manufacturing company and for some, that's something that they strive for
and and want, staying in nice hotels, those kinds of things. Your dad was still in the church?
By this time, he was fully out of ministry and at the time when our business became very
lucrative, then most things of ministry fell away. Eventually, he was involved in adultery and that
was very hard on all of us, especially on my mom, of course and even I, was single,
my brother was married, my sister was still at home and single and knowing what roles we play
and so on. So you had two things, you had, from the outside, you look and you see success, "Oh look
at that, that's going really well," And I can look at Joseph and see the same thing, you
know, he was so successful with Potiphar, and even in the prison, he had worked
his way up and so on and you can see that, and then, you think of what he really was going
through and for us, we were dealing with unfortunately something that isn't even that
uncommon, that someone involved in ministry gets involved in in in adultery, eventually, there
was divorce. Pause and let me ask you a little, deeper question. You're the
middle? I'm the middle child, of the three. When this news landed, you became aware of the secrets,
how did you feel? What did you do with that? Were you close to your father? Oh, we
were very close. You are not only an employee. Worked together every day, I was a co-owner
and then actually, when all of that broke, I was already living here, so there
was some distance as well and so typical of the complexities of life, there was closeness and
distance. And your mom. But my mom was there and so far away from me hard, for me to support
her, and obviously I was trying to, as best I could, lots of phone calls and so on, but
you search for meaning in anything. Does it matter that I'm in school? Does it matter who my friends
are? Does anything matter? I think you work through the hardest things, everything's up for grabs.
Did you consider going back to Canada, to be there with her? Oh yeah and ended up flying quite often
to be with her, or at times, she was able to come see me and she'd come for an extended time and
and so on, because this wasn't just a one-day event, right? This is an ongoing,
how do we deal with this? And it became known, among friends? Well, yes and no. Some
knew and some didn't, and there was never full disclosure and to be honest, we
don't even know all the details, of all the different things that were going on, but it
appears that there was some history of this, and so you see the brokenness, you see
you see unbelievable success, and you see none of it's worth it. And the success went on?
For some time So, the Lord didn't pull the plug and I say, "Okay, I'm bringing
consequences, because you're not walking with me and money does a funny thing, you know,
when you have access to money, you can do a lot of other things. I don't want to say,
cover it up but you can involve yourself in a lot of things, that you don't have to face ,
the brokenness, that you would if there wasn't that much you can afford escape routes. yeah
you