01/16/2018
I asked God, Asked Jesus… I have been asking for a long time, years, off and on. “Jesus, what happened to your step dad? Joseph?”. I was quiet and just let Jesus be – “Why has no one talked about him? Why is he never mentioned? I bet he took off. I bet he got angry when Jesus said he was doing his Father’s work at 12 years old. Did Joseph think Jesus was meaning he wasn’t the father? Did Joseph die?” -
There is a long pause, perhaps a minute. When all of a sudden I felt this overwhelming emotion. It was pain. It wasn’t my pain, but someone's else. It was the pain of abandonment. Most likely shared between the mother Mary and the kids. I held on to it as long as I could. I did my best to soak up everything I could. Here is what I could get out of it, to put into words:
Joseph went out to secure a better quality of life for us. He projected sincerity when he left. “We waited for him. And he never came back.”
And then the logic came to me. People could never say what happened. There were those who thought Joseph abandon this family to create or join another family and another wife because of Jesus. Then others thought he died within his journey. Either drowned in a river, fell off a cliff, or even sold into slavery. No one could say one way or other. So, people said nothing. No one truly knew Joseph's motives. I believe only the Father knew and not the Son at that time. The Son went through what we humans go through, that pain of abandonment.
Lastly I get the sense – The Son took care of a widow and his mother at the same time.
sj