That year there were about ten or fifteen presents under the tree for me from my brother. They were all beautifully wrapped, which was not in keeping with his usual style. All of the gifts had a specific number, indicating the order in which I was supposed to open them. I’d been looking at those presents for weeks and could not wait to see what it was that my brother was going to give me. On Christmas morning, I started opening my presents, beginning with the ones from my brother. I worked through nearly all of the boxes only to find that he had pulled small, often broken toys from my room and wrapped them up for me. By the time I came to that final box, I was angry with him, trying to figure out what else he had taken from my room. But when I opened that last numbered box, waiting at the bottom was a video game I had wished for with the eager expectation that can only come from a young child.
I’ve thought about that particular Christmas a great deal in the last two years as I realize we often receive “gifts” that are neither the ones we want nor expect. Then I keep coming back to Joseph’s role in the Christmas story. Joseph planned to get married to a nice girl named Mary, have a family, follow in his father’s footsteps, and live a quiet life. Yet in the midst of his plans, God had other ideas. Joseph became, as a nun with whom I used to work described him, “the stepfather of our Lord and Savior.” Joseph taught Jesus what it meant to be fully human, work with His hands, and do all of the things that a boy would need to learn, all while knowing that he was not Jesus’s biological father.
In all of their time together, I imagine that Joseph kept hearing the words of the angel of the Lord in the back of his mind, “He will save his people from their sins.” Right now I feel like we all need that same reminder. These past twenty months have left many of us feeling incredibly out of sorts. Now we are about to celebrate the birth of the One who saves us from our sins. I know with all of my heart and soul that everything we have seen and done, all of the pain and inconveniences we have experienced, all of the griefs and heartaches we have endured offer us the prelude to the simple fact that through Jesus we are assured of redemption and life everlasting.