“To Isaac I gave Jacob and Esau. I gave Mount Seir to Esau to take over. But Jacob and his sons went down to Egypt.” – Joshua 24:4 (CEB)
One sentence, and an entire family history moves through it. Isaac has two sons. One settles into the hill country of Seir. The other, Jacob, ends up leading his whole family down into Egypt, the beginning of four hundred years away from the land God promised them.
Joshua doesn’t explain why. He doesn’t need to. Every family history has a sentence like this one, a move nobody fully planned, a detour that turned into a chapter nobody expected to write. Jacob’s sons went down to Egypt looking for grain during a famine. They didn’t know they were walking into centuries of slavery.
What looked like a detour in your family’s story turned out, later, to matter more than anyone realized at the time. Can you see it yet, or only look back and find it?
God of Jacob’s long road, you were present in the detours my family never planned. Help me trust you in the parts of my story I don’t understand yet. Amen.