The World Joseph Helped Build

Imagine Being a Child in Egypt

Hello, fellow children.

I want you to imagine being a child in Egypt. The pyramids are already impossibly old. You are old enough to carry a small sack, but not old enough to decide anything important.

The sun is low, and you are standing with your mother in a long line outside a stone building. It is cool inside — dark — and it smells like cereal. The building is the storehouse.

Your family grew wheat before the drought. Your father remembers the fields along the river, but now everyone comes here instead.

When It's Your Turn

When it's your turn, a man with clean hands weighs the grain carefully. He doesn't look angry. He doesn't look kind either.

Your mother hands over the last coins wrapped in cloth. You watch the grain pour out. It looks like plenty in the bag, plenty in this big silo — and not enough poured into the little sack.

A Child's Question

As you walk home, you ask: Why do we have to pay for it if we grew it on our land?

Your mother squeezes your hand and says quietly, "This is just how things work now."

You don't understand everything, but you can feel it. Something's wrong — even though everything looks organized.

This Is the World Joseph Helped Build

This is the world Joseph helped build.

Sometimes the systems that look most orderly, most efficient, most well-run are the very ones that squeeze the life out of ordinary people. And sometimes the heroes of our stories — even the ones God used — built things that demand our honest reckoning. A child can feel when something isn't right, even when the adults have learned to call it normal.