Home > Lenten Blog 2026
Dreamers, Pits, and Choosing Love (Featuring Donny Osmond)
March 6, 2026
Genesis 37:3-4, 12-28|Matt 21:33-43|Psalm 105:16-22
In the midst of uncertainty, Lent asks us to pause, reflect, and seek clarity. Not clarity that simplifies the world into winners and losers, heroes, and villains. But clarity about who we are and how we are called to live.
When I opened up today’s readings, I couldn’t help but smile. I got Joseph. Not just any Joseph. The dreamer. The favored son. The one thrown into a pit and sold for twenty pieces of silver. And, for me, inevitably, the Joseph played by Donny Osmond in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.
When I was a child, I was fully convinced I would grow up, marry Donny Osmond, and we would live in a human-sized Barbie Dream Camper. This felt not aspirational but completely logical. It was a solid life plan. So how could I not focus my Lenten reflection on this reading? But Genesis 37 is not all jazz hands and catchy choruses.
Joseph is beloved by his father, and everyone knows it. The robe is more than fabric—it is a symbol of favoritism and hierarchy, of a family system fraying at the edges. His brothers “could not speak peaceably to him.” They can’t even manage civility. Resentment and envy grow, and when they see him coming from a distance, they do not see a brother. They see “this dreamer.” They strip him of his robe, throw him into a pit, then they sit down to eat. It is such a familiar image of human brokenness. Harm is done. Lunch is served. Life goes on.
Sitting with this reading, I realized it forces me to confront something hard: what happens when clarity reveals not just the world’s brokenness—but my own?
Lent removes the technicolor layers we wrap around ourselves—our certainty, our self-righteousness, our need to be right, our carefully curated identities. It asks uncomfortable questions:
Where am I harboring resentment?
Where can I “not speak peaceably” to someone?
Where have I reduced another person to a label—“dreamer,” “liberal,” “conservative,” “difficult,” “other”—instead of seeing a sibling?
It would be easy to cast myself as Joseph in this story, but the truth is sometimes I am Joseph, sometimes I am a brother, sometimes I am sitting down to eat while someone else is in the pit.
Lent is not about shame. It is about refinement. About seeing clearly what envy does. What favoritism does. What unchecked resentment does. And then choosing differently. Choosing love.
So what does love look like in a Joseph-shaped Lent? I think it looks less like a Broadway finale and more like daily discipline:
- Speaking peaceably, even when I don’t feel like it.
- Refusing to strip someone else of dignity because I feel threatened.
- Not sitting comfortably when someone nearby is in a pit.
Childhood me believed in technicolor certainty: marry Donny, buy the camper, live happily ever after. Adult me knows that life includes pits, betrayal, and long stretches of waiting. But I also know this: God wastes nothing. Not the dreams. Not the envy. Not even the pit.
This Lent, I am praying for the courage to look honestly at the places where resentment or fear might shape my reactions, and for the humility to speak peaceably. And I am praying for the trust to believe that even in the pit, God’s got this.
And if somewhere in the background there’s a faint chorus of “Any Dream Will Do,” well… I’m okay with that too.
Shareen Knowlton
