I’ve met so many women who get their identity from their husbands or affiliation with someone.
Most people recognise them as “this persons this” or “that persons this”.
They don’t really have an identity in the eye of the public.

Sometimes it is true that the person they are affiliated with might be so affluent to the point that their identity overshadows those associated with them but most times, in the cases where people refer to others with other people’s identity, it’s to exude the same authority and influence the real person has.

We never see Potiphar wife’s name in the bible, from Genesis through to Revelation. Every time she was made reference to, she was Potiphars wife.
Who knows if she was just as rich or literate or as powerful as Potiphar?
We’ll never know because once she married him, she took his identity, and this wasn’t merely his last name, but she became ‘Potiphars wife’.

I’m sure most of us just know her as the wife that wanted to truncate Josephs destiny. The promiscuous woman that couldn’t keep her marital bed undefiled.
But through reading the book and the notes I wrote, I realised that Potiphars wife must have been truly hurting.
She must have felt neglected and relegated in the eyes of everyone as that’s so obvious because we can’t even put a name to her!

She was married to one of the strongest and most influential men in Egypt.
Potiphar had so much to do and so many places to be,
She must have been bored during the days with slave girls all around her but having nothing to do, she probably was truly the devils workshop because she had all her time, and her mind constantly idle.
I’m thinking she only had an identity when portiphar got home and needed a wife to fulfil physical marriage duties.
Suddenly at those times, she must’ve had a name.

But the fact that she was hurting doesn’t give any credence to her action of luring Joseph to sleep with her.
Which is where my lesson was borne in her story.
“I need to deal with issues that are legitimately hurtful and uncomfortable without sinning against God”.

With the massive void this woman might have felt in her life, she could’ve used all that free time to start up something lucrative, or spend meaningful time doing something a First Lady would or better still, looking for a God that was true and real, rather than sit around entertaining thoughts that’ll lead to seducing a boy half her age into bed with her (cougar alert!).

There’ll be times in our journey when things will get hard, we’ll be hurting, things might not go the way we thought they would, and we might feel neglected, rejected and abandoned like Potiphars wife felt, but what we do in those moments matters and goes a long way to show where our heart truly lies and how big we say our God is.

From her, we learn that God should always be our first point of call, even when we’ve prayed to Him concerning things and they still seem to be going in the exact same direction.

#theresHealingInGod #PainIsNotReasonEnoughToSin
#badGirlsOfTheBible