Dreamer thumped his heart with his clenched fist. “The sword of sorrow pierced my father’s heart. I carried the weight of my father’s sorrow away with me. I heard him weeping still, long after I was sold in Egypt.”
The words of the Dreamer and his father’s tears were too much for me to bear. I felt the grief of every father for every lost child. It pushed me down to my knees.
Joseph the Dreamer commanded me to rise, “Get up! The weight of the world’s sorrow is too much for any man.”
“I can’t.” My legs would not move. My shoulders trembled as I remembered the moment of holding my dead baby. Kissing his sweet forehead as I laid him in the grave. I began to weep.
Then Samuel, my son, lifted me to my feet. “Father, I am here. It’s me … the son you lost.”
I was able to stand. Able to breathe. I wrapped my arms around his neck and clung to him with joy.
“Come away.” The Dreamer clasped my hand and the hand of my son, and we three stepped back through the veil of color. I was relieved as we departed the sorrow of the world. We left all that behind, entering again into the peace of the heavenly vineyard.
We sat on the knoll overlooking the vines. I thought to myself that surely many years had passed on earth since I had died.
I said to the Dreamer, “I never want to go back to the world as it is.”
The Dreamer answered, “I suffered at the hands of strangers for many years. I was thirty years old when the Lord lifted me out of prison and I entered the service of Pharaoh and became a prince in Egypt. The Lord revealed to me the famine that was to come upon all the world, and I stored the grain of Egypt for seven years. There was enough grain to feed the world.”
The Dreamer raised his hand and pointed across the green and gold vines. “Look there! Time is nothing. My brothers, famished beggars, come seeking the help of one they do not know and will not recognize. They come to Egypt to buy grain from the prince of Egypt … the brother they mocked and sold as a slave.”
I saw in the distance a cloud of dust sweeping across a distant land. The cloud did not come near the vines of heaven.
The Dreamer commanded that we hold tightly to his sleeve. “Come!” he commanded. “Hurry!”
Suddenly we stood in the hall of a great Egyptian palace. The brothers of Joseph, older now, lean and weathered by sun and trouble, came walking as a group through the marble corridor.
We followed as they were ushered into the presence of a great man.
The Dreamer said to us, “That is who I became after all my suffering. They live in tents and tend my father’s flocks. I am the prince of Egypt. I know my brothers, but they do not recognize me.”
The eleven brothers bowed down before Joseph the prince, just as Joseph, as a boy, had dreamed they would. They presented him with gifts of frankincense and myrrh.
The Dreamer said to me, “There is my younger brother, Benjamin. We shared the same mother, Rachel. She died giving birth to the lad. I was present when he was born. He was a comfort to me and to my old father.”
Samuel and I observed as the eyes of the prince fixed on Benjamin with such longing that I thought his heart would break.
Suddenly, the prince shouted that all his attendants should withdraw. As the Egyptians scurried out, the prince began to weep in front of his brothers. They looked at one another in confusion as Joseph’s tears streamed down his face. “I am Joseph! Is my father still living?”
The brothers could not answer him. They were terrified at his presence.
He stood from his throne and descended. “Come close to me,” Joseph entreated them.
They hesitantly moved toward him.
“I am your brother Joseph, the one whom you sold into Egypt. And now, do not be distressed or angry with yourselves for selling me here, because it was to save lives that God sent me ahead of you. For two years now there has been a famine in the land, and for the next five years there will not be plowing or reaping. But God sent me ahead of you to preserve a remnant on earth and to save your lives by a great deliverance. So, then, it was