Becoming a Joseph

(Another guest post - this time from my dear husband. :-))
Up to this point you have mainly been following the blog about our adoption through the words and posts by my wife, Jill, with a few additions from our daughter. She has done an extremely wonderful job sharing our story and it will be a great record for us to treasure and cherish in years to come of our adoption story and how we brought Elijah home to his forever family.

I thought that maybe it was about time to share just a little of myself and my feelings with all of you about Elijah and our adoption. I titled it “Becoming a Joseph”, and not because of the middle name we chose for our son, but because of the way I have learned to relate to Joseph, the father of Jesus in the Bible. I feel that I can understand him more and what he was like and maybe some of his feelings. You don’t read much about him in the bible, but what little there is you start to realize what type of man he must have been. How he took care of his wife (Mary) and his family, and how much he truly loved and sacrificed for his son.

You see Joseph was not the biological father of Jesus and he could have easily just turned his back and walked away, and no one would have thought bad of him for doing this. But through a calling on his life from God and the love he had for this little baby he became the true father that he was meant to be. He brought this little child into his life to love him and provide for him just like he was his very own child. I don’t know if the term adoption was used back then or not, but that is exactly what Joseph did, he brought this little child into his family and Jesus became his son.

If you have been following our blog from the beginning, you may have remembered back in the middle of October that I needed to make a trip to Indianapolis to get a document redone for our paperwork. Well, that trip is over a 12 hour trip and you can get a lot of praying in when you are in a car by yourself for that long. I took full advantage of that opportunity. You see the trip was for my son and I never had any second thoughts about having to travel that far. I would have gone half way around the world if needed for my son, for any of my children. During my time of praying, God reminded me about the story of Joseph and how Joseph would have also done anything for his son.
When I finally stopped to rest for the night I looked up all of the scriptures I could find on Joseph. The more I read, the more I understood what a perfect model of a father Joseph was and how by following his examples I can become more of the fathers God has calls me to be. Joseph loved his family unconditionally, he gave up everything for them, he went so far as even going to Egypt, and yet it was never about himself but it was always about his family. In many ways that is how I have felt this whole adoption process has been for me. It has been mostly about Elijah, some about my wonderful wife and a lot about God and how He has worked in it all. I have kind of felt like the passenger in the back seat of the bus, but for those of you that really know my personality that is where I would prefer to be anyways, unseen, unheard, and in the back row. So reading and studying about Joseph has taught me many things, but mostly it has taught me how to become a better husband and better father.
There is one more piece to this story that God has shared with me and that happened when I arrived back home from my trip. Every year, we put a large lighted nativity set in our front yard for Christmas. It consists of Mary, Joseph, Jesus, 3 wise men, a shepherd and some sheep. When I arrived back home to my surprise Joseph was not working, he was the only set of lights that was not working. So when we drove up the road to our house you could see there was something that just wasn’t right about the scene. God used this image to show me that even though I would like to be the Joseph and not be seen, without me in the picture it is just not complete. So when I finally had some free time, I went to work to fix Joseph again. I am happy to say that he is now back in the picture and it looks much better. The scene is now complete again.
For all of the husbands/fathers out there that are going through the same process that I did, rest assured you are not alone. My prayer for you is that you like me may learn to become a little bit more like Joseph. That we learn to love and support our wives a little bit more each day and above all for the children, whose lives depend on us that we can be there for them in all of their needs.

Pat