When Life Delays Your Plans - Be Like Joseph

An important part of my work with career counseling and business coaching clients is to help them set targets for what they want to accomplish or see happen in their work and personal lives. I do it to help them establish a focus or goals that they can work toward – positive targets that they can take action to achieve. The challenge for each of us is that real life intrudes on our plans. This was recently brought to my attention in an unusual way.

I was reading through the bible account of the Christmas story when it struck me how many times life intruded on Joseph’s plans. In bible times there was a specific way an engaged guy got prepared for the upcoming wedding and married life. The groom-to-be was supposed to have an established career and to also spend his free time building a house for his wife and him to live in after the ceremony. No doubt, Joseph was working on these two things when everything went off the rails.

First, the guy’s fiancé comes up pregnant, then she claims she’s never slept with another guy but that the baby is God’s. It’s bad enough that he has to decide what to do with an unfaithful fiancé but doubly hard because she may be crazy. So, Joseph decides he’ll hide her until after the baby arrives, then quietly call off the wedding. (Maybe he’ll keep building the house or maybe he’ll just keep living in his parent’s basement – we aren’t told.) Then an angel shows up one night and tells him the girl isn’t a skank or nuts, the baby is God’s, and that he should go on with the wedding plans – which he does.

Until the Roman emperor Augustus, who lives 2,455 miles away, decides he needs a headcount of the empire to determine if anyone is shirking on their taxes. So, when Mary is thirty-eight- or nine-weeks pregnant Joseph has to leave the house he’s built, load her on a pack mule, and walk for seven-to-ten days to get to his family’s original hometown of Bethlehem.

Bethlehem is just a village, with most of its residents making a living just to get by. There probably isn’t but the one hotel that the bible mentions, so Joseph gets temporary lodging in a stable that’s crowded with the animals people have brought to town, until he can get something better. (Think crowded valet parking – with manure.) The baby arrives in a crowded, smelly, unsanitary space. Five days later he has to turn around and take Mary back to Jerusalem (thankfully only about five miles away) for the bris ceremony where the boy gets circumcised and named.

When they return to Bethlehem he does odd jobs until the Romans get their headcount finished. Things go okay for a while until some foreign astronomers show up and give them some outrageously expensive gifts. As they're leaving Joseph gets warned in a dream that the governor is about to kill all the boys two-and-younger in the whole area, so he takes their new swag, loads Mary and the baby on the mule and heads to Egypt for a few months until the carnage is over.

When another angel shows up to tell Joseph the danger is over he decides he’s done with Bethlehem and moves the family back to Nazareth where he was living peacefully before the whole thing started. Maybe when he gets back the house is still there, and maybe people still remember the carpentry business he’d worked so hard to start. We aren’t told.

The bible doesn’t tell us much about Joseph, except to say he was “a just man” and later that Jesus was described as “Joseph’s son” and “the carpenter’s son”. It’s clear that God thought enough of him to send him angels to tell him what to do and it’s also clear that Joseph obeyed those instructions, even if they made his life chaotic. But otherwise, Joseph’s life is just a footnote in a book with lots of big stories.

Still, the Christmas story doesn't happen without Joseph. In fact, had Joseph taken a different action at any point in the story its doubtful we'd even have the New Testament part of the bible today. Lives that feel like little stories sometimes make a big difference. So how did Joseph make a difference?

One thing I took from his story is that Joseph kept doing “the next right thing”. He kept moving forward toward with what he thought was right, even if didn’t make sense, was inconvenient, and the consequences would probably delay his plans. Joseph was a man of solid character who did what was right, even if it cost him something, and he kept moving forward.

Second, Joseph held his plans loosely. He didn’t complain about the unfairness of his life and all the interruptions and delays with his business start-up and family plans. He also wasn’t so intent on making sure they happened that he took matters into his own hands and went back to Nazareth before it was the right time. He was patient and trusted the process.

And I think that’s my biggest takeaway – Joseph trusted. I’m sure his family and friends thought (and told him) he was crazy. I’m sure he was perplexed and enraged at the crazy behavior of politicians and how their agendas made his life so very difficult. And I’m sure he was exhausted by all the twists and turns, delays and non-starters that happened in those early years of his adult life. But the bible never tells us that Joseph cried out “Why?” or complained about it all, he just seemed to trust that God was going to make it all work out right. And it did.

So here we are at Christmas, 2021. Coronavirus is still making headlines and the news is still making people scared. Bad things (like tornados) are happening to good people. Politicians are still making decisions that make us scratch our heads while inflation rockets on. And, perhaps your life isn’t moving in the direction you’d hoped or as quickly toward your goals as you’d like.

My hope and prayer for all of us is that maybe we’d each have a bit of Joseph in us this season and in the coming year. That we'd set our targets and do the next right things but hold our plans loosely. That we'd be patient and trust that God will help us accomplish the things that will make our lives a significant part of a bigger story. It worked out well for Joseph - there's reason to believe it will work out well for you.

And if you're trying to figure out how all of that works, then send me a note. I'd be glad to talk with you about it.