The Donor Letter

In 2017, a young woman named Kechi Okwuchi stood on the stage of America's Got Talent and sang with a voice that silenced the room. What the audience didn't immediately know was that Kechi was one of only two survivors of a 2005 plane crash in Nigeria that killed 107 people, including many of her classmates. She endured over a hundred surgeries. The scars covered most of her body.

Years later, Kechi wrote a letter to the family of an organ donor whose tissue grafts had helped reconstruct her face. She didn't write with bitterness about what she had lost. She wrote with astonishment about what had been preserved. "I am alive," she said, "and I don't take a single day for granted."

That posture — looking back at devastation and choosing to see providence rather than cruelty — is precisely what Joseph embodies in Genesis 45. His brothers sold him into slavery. He spent years in a foreign prison. Yet when he finally stands before them with the power to destroy their lives, he weeps and says, "Do not be distressed or angry with yourselves, because it was to save lives that God sent me ahead of you."

Joseph doesn't minimize the betrayal. He reframes it. What his brothers intended as a burial, the Almighty redesigned as a rescue mission. The same God who held Kechi through fire held Joseph through the pit — not to erase the suffering, but to redeem it into something no one saw coming.