We’ve had moments when we have wondered where our children are. Once, when Andrew was 6 or 7, we spent what seemed like hours searching for him at a theme park. But three days? I’m guessing that we would be pretty frantic if we couldn’t find either of our children for three days.

We would look everywhere. We would ask everyone we could find if they had seen someone about this tall, with this color eyes, wearing that tunic I made…

The people most desperate to find Jesus, the people willing to give up just about anything to figure out where he was were…Mary and Joseph.

They had been up to Jerusalem as a family, taking Jesus when he was about 12. It was about the time when he would go from being a child of his parents to being a child of the Law, accountable for his own behavior before the Law.  When his parents left, they thought he was with other relatives, perhaps with his cousin John. A day into the trip back to Nazareth, it was clear that he wasn’t near.

And then, they started their desperate search.

Of course they found him, reasoning in the temple with the (rest of the) rabbis.  And he told them he was involved in the family business. Since Joseph was a carpenter, not a rabbi, it was pretty clear that Jesus was talking about his Real Father.

But that desperation. I can’t get past that desperation. What would it be like to be that devoted to finding Jesus?

I wonder.

(From Luke 2:41-52)