Joseph was about to doze off when he thought he heard music overhead. He looked up into the night sky and was amazed to see a canopy of glittering stars. He tried to speak but words won’t come…
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The numerous stars in the sky made him recall the story he learned about his ancestors growing up. God spoke to Abraham and promised him that his descendants will be as the numbers of the stars, “Do not be afraid, I am your shield.” Joseph took comfort in his ancestral promise that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob will protect him and Mary…sleep came. A couple of hours into the night, Joseph woke up shivering to find the fire had gone. He knew there were no woods to be found around the area. He moved closer to Mary to keep her warm. The sky was shimmering with diamond dusts like a broad river across the sky. He looked up gazing so long his neck grew stiff so he lay on his back with eyes wide open in awe!
“When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him?” asked his ancestor, the psalmist, King David. Joseph asked in silence, “Why me, LORD – I’m just a carpenter and Mary is just another poor girl in the neighborhood. How are we to bring up your son? We don’t have much. I don’t even know what we are going to have for breakfast when Mary wakes in the morning with the sun.” As if his own mother who died last year spoke to him in the wind, “Joseph, your worrying is blotting out your celestial view. Remember the psalm, ‘Be still and know that I am God.’”
They had less than seven miles to go. He gave the last handful of raisins to Mary to eat. He found someone who needed his door repaired. Joseph repaired the door, and received enough to buy food and some milk. Again, Joseph remembers Abraham naming the LORD, The God Who Provides.
As they say, the rest is history…
If I visited Joseph today, I say to him, “Your humility, your ‘letting go’ of your pride, and agreed to wed Mary despite the scandal, was worth millions if not billions of life. Thank you! The little boy who ran around in your carpentry shop playing with your tools and watching your every move – His name is mentioned more than anyone else in history – More books have been written about Him than any other person, with the book He and His teachings are centered is most universally published book ever, Bible. He has inspired all kinds of creative works, such as songs, artworks, and even movies about him since the dawn of cinema. He is mentioned in more website than anyone else is in the whole world. He inspired charities such as World Vision, and Compassion to help the poor. Millions, possibly billions of people around the world, including me, worship Him as the Living Son of God, who once died for our sins and the sins of the whole world and is now in heaven – alive!
Everyday his name, Jesus is mentioned more often than any other person. Some uses it in prayer, some when they swear. Every year at this time of the year, His birth is remembered and celebrated more than any other birth in the history of man. Even the years of the common calendar are counted from the time of His Birth. Your baby boy is now two thousand and eleven years old! LOL! That’s old! He, JESUS is somebody nobody can ignore! Even those who despise him and atheists chose not to believe Him. And Joseph, did you know that he was the most humble person ever? I mean, He who placed all the galaxies in the universe, He who saw you from beyond Andromeda kept you and Mary awake at night when he was teething, became the most captivating man ever. WOW!
They say that journey of life is searching for truth! To appreciate the scale of what you saw that night a spit and a throw stone from Samaria, it is called the Milky Way, one of the galaxies in the universe… that if it were the size of the entire continent of North America, our solar system would fit in a coffee cup. Even now, two Voyager spacecrafts are hurtling toward the edge of our solar system at a rate of 100,000 miles per hour. For almost three decades, they have been speeding away from this planet earth, approaching a distance of 9 billion miles. When engineers beam a command to the spacecraft the speed of light, it takes thirteen hours to arrive. Yet this vast neighborhood of our sun – in truth the size of a coffee cup – fits along with several hundred billion other stars and their minions in the Milky Way, one of perhaps 100 billion such galaxies in the universe. To send a light-speed message to the edge of the universe would take 15 billion years. But with His Name, Jesus, we enter into His throne of Grace instantly. How awesome is that! So when I look into the sky, like so many people in the world do at night, I can either grovel as just another humanoid, a speck of dust in the universe, or exclaim in worship, “O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!” I know many choose the latter because we believe! Michael W. Smith sings that psalm with so much passion of one who loves his Lord!
I can see Joseph leaning back, a lazy smile broke his bearded face and exclaimed, “Who knew!” [/restrict]