Imagine your life falling apart, cut off from your family, your future uncertain, your identity reduced to a label you didn’t choose. Then one moment comes, private, invisible, complying would be easy to justify. No one would blame you. In fact, it might even help you survive.

But this is exactly the point that counts, when no one is looking. Who are you? What do you stand for? You are exactly what you do not compromise.

You can see this abstract idea becoming one of the most important moments in the life of Prophet Joseph.

He was thrown into a well by his own brothers.

Sold off as a slave to a Governor in Egypt.

And then the day comes when the Governor’s wife demands that he comply with her desires, but even in the face of his apparent downhill life, as a slave, he had no future, and not complying would only make his life harder in this corrupt and immoral system, and he knew that.

And have you ever had such moments in your life where you ask yourself, how would me making such a small compromise matter in my already depressing life? Going with the flow is just so easy.

But he still decided not to be ungrateful to his Lord and the Governor who had taken care of him.

He ran, in pursuit of him, the Governor’s wife tore his shirt. Whilst the Governor arrived, though soon he uncovered this was his wife’s doing.

The story of the “Governor’s wife chasing her slave” began to spread among the elite women of the city. As long as Yusuf was in the house, the scandal remained alive, so the Governor jailed Prophet Joseph to save face.

It can be clearly seen throughout this Prophet Joseph has been caught up in one event after another, each one out of his control, only his character within these events was in his control. He knows who he is, “a son of a Prophet”, and is unwilling to compromise on his conduct.

And this same standard by which he carried himself, by not losing hope in his Lord, not willing to succumb to the Governor’s wife, etc., became the reasons for his rise from a slave with no future to the Treasurer of Egypt.

We also live in quite a similar world where everything can be bought, and my question to you is, do you have such standards for yourself?