The Family That Had to Run

It was the middle of the night.

You know how dark it gets in the deep of the night, when everyone you love is sleeping and the house is quiet? That is when the angel came to Joseph in a dream.

"Get up," the angel said. "Get up quickly. Take the child. Take his mother. Run to Egypt, far away, and stay there. A king is coming to hurt him. Go now."

So Joseph got up in the dark.

He did not wait for morning. He did not pack slowly. He woke Mary, and he lifted up little Jesus, still warm and sleeping, and they slipped out into the night while the whole village dreamed.

Maybe you have felt what it is to be small and afraid, and to be carried somewhere new in the dark. The world is so big when you are little. And there was no safe place behind them now. Only the long road, and the cold, and a strange land ahead where they knew no one.

A little child, running for his life.

That was the King of all the world.

Far behind them, the angry king did a terrible thing, and there was crying in the town. Mothers weeping for their children. And no one could comfort them. It was one of the saddest nights the earth has ever known.

God saw every tear. He did not look away from a single one. He never does. Even on the night that broke so many hearts, not one of those children slipped past his love.

And the little family ran on. And God ran with them.

Long before, this very thing had happened. Once God's whole family went down into Egypt, in the days when another Joseph kept them safe there. And once God called them up out again, his own dear children, the way a father calls a son. "Out of Egypt I called my son," he had said.

And now here was the true Son himself, going down into Egypt, small and hidden. One day God would call him up out again, into the light.

In time the cruel king died, and the angel came again. "It is safe now," he said. "Go back." So Joseph carried Jesus home, to a little town called Nazareth, and there the child grew.

Jesus knows what it is to be afraid in the night. He knows what it is to have nowhere safe, to be carried far from home, to be a little one the world wanted to harm. He has been there himself.

So when you are frightened, you are not alone. You never will be. The One who runs to find you ran too, once, when he was very small, and his Father's eyes never once left him.

And in Nazareth the boy grew taller year by year, learning to work beside Joseph, safe under his Father's watch. The next road he walked would lead up to Jerusalem.