Soul Food: Week of January 7, 2024

“Soul Food” is a regularly updated calendar of meditations sometimes questioning conventional wisdom & often suggesting eternal values …

Sunday-Saturday: The Holy Family had been in Egypt a short while when Joseph had another visitation … The Angel said: “Rise! Take with you the child & his mother & set out for the Land of Israel. They who were plotting against the life of the child are dead.”

… The youthful carpenter would have blushed if anyone had called him noble, but he was noble beyond the calling of any man. No love of a man for a woman had been put to such spirit-breaking tests as this one & survived in unquestioning meekness. If he had felt so disposed, he could have passed the visitations of the angel off as wishful dreams. He could have banished his bide, had her stoned to death, or, at the least, had her sent off to a faraway place to have her baby in loneliness & sorrow.

[Joseph] sustained all the trials, and it dizzied his mind to think that, for all his remaining days, he would be on special trial before the eyes of God. Then too, although he had committed no crime, he was forced to flee hundreds of miles to Egypt, and now, in some trepidation, he was going back to his homeland, perhaps to face arrest & sudden death …

Excerpted from Jim Bishops “The Day Christ Was Born”

Davd Soul