You're listening to Catholic Sprouts, the daily podcast for Catholic kids that strives to plant seeds of faith.

Hey there, Sprouts. Today is Thursday, March 14th, 2019. We are also, of course, still in the season of

Lent. This week on the Catholic Spouts podcast, we are talking about Jesus Christ, which we will be doing for the

remainder of Lent, talking about him as the great teacher. We discussed why God became man,

the great act of love that was the incarnation, and also the dangerous and uncertain circumstances

that surrounded the birth of Jesus and what all of these things mean. Today, we are going to be

talking about a very well-known story from the early

life of Jesus Christ, and it's fact the only story that we have of him as a boy. It comes from

the Gospel of Luke, and it is about the time that Jesus remained behind in Jerusalem and was

found in the temple with the teachers of the faith.

So let's talk about this a little bit.

So every year Jesus went with his parents, Joseph and Mary, down to Jerusalem for the feast of the Passover.

The Jewish people had certain customs that they would do.

It sounded like they were traveling with a big group from Nazareth, of family and friends,

and that one of the things I like to think about, of course, is that Jesus had cousins and friends.

And when the festival was done, they left Jerusalem in a big group.

And Joseph and Mary probably assumed that Jesus was with his cousins or with his friends

in a different part of the caravan.

In fact, we learned from the gospel that they traveled for an entire day away from Jerusalem,

probably camped somewhere that night. And that night as they were

settling in, they were frantically searching for Jesus and couldn't find him. So they returned to

Jerusalem. And the gospel also tells us that they searched for three more days in Jerusalem

...