A Boy!

By Cynthia Ruchti

What did Joseph do while Mary was in labor with their son Jesus? Did he pace outside the stable? Did he read magazines, boil water, argue with the innkeeper for a better room?

Did Joseph sit around a campfire with other travelers and let their wives attend to Mary?

Did he spend the night in prayer, alone with his God, or at his wife’s side?

Traditions were decidedly different in biblical times. We know Joseph was not likely coaching his wife to breathe like this: Hee hee hee whooooo. Hee hee hee whoooo. He didn’t have a camcorder in hand to memorialize the moment on video or a camera phone to catch his son’s entrance into the world.

Joseph wouldn’t have handed a digital camera to the shepherds and asked, “Could one of you take a picture of the three of us. Smile, Mary.”

But the moment was recorded forever in Scripture and no doubt marked indelibly on Joseph’s heart, as it is in our faith-created imaginations.

Jesus, God’s Son, entered our world, not because He didn’t know what it was like, but because He did…, and knew He had to come rescue us.

What did Joseph do the moment he realized the boy he held was his own Deliverer?

QUOTE: Mary wasn’t the only one in labor the night Jesus was born. Imagine the birth pangs in the heart of the God who sent Him to earth!

“And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger,” Luke 2:7 KJV.

Today’s devotional is by Cynthia Ruchti, writer and producer of the radio ministry THE HEARTBEAT OF THE HOME and current president of American Christian Fiction Writers (ACFW). Cynthia’s debut novel—They Almost Always Come Home—releases from Abingdon press May 1, 2010. Cynthia writes stories of hope-that-glows-in-the-dark. www.cynthiaruchti.com.