Thursday of the Third Week of Advent
Sometimes bravery includes going against our own self-interest or against our own ego. By most worldly standards, St. Joseph went against his own interests. He learns his betrothed is pregnant with a child that is not his. To a different man, the shame of that might be too much. Even when an angel appears to him in a dream and tells him that the unborn child is the Son of God, there could still be a wound to a man’s pride. But St. Joseph is not that kind of man. He is not so jealous of his ego that he can’t raise and care for a child that is not his biological son. He is not threatened by the prospect of having a family that will certainly not be like any other family in human history. How lucky we are that St. Joseph did not place his ego above all else, or we would have been denied a tremendous saint in him. And frankly, St. Joseph is fortunate because his decisions paved the way for his own redemption, and nothing is more important than one’s salvation.
Sometimes God might ask us to sacrifice our own ego for something that is actually more important - even if we cannot fathom the importance. What matters most is that, like St. Joseph, we place God’s will first, trusting that what God has planned is always better than we could expect.