You had the support of extended family, the support of community, and they all were reinforcing the same identities.

What's up, guys? Welcome to another five-minute fatherhood. So if you were studying the best child that ever lived, and you wanted to reverse engineer what his parents did, Jesus' parents,

what is the Mary and Joseph School of Parenting? What was their method? And so we have really

like one story really from Luke chapter two of Mary and Joseph and the way that they parented Jesus.

Now this story doesn't reflect particularly well

on Mary and Joseph for a lot of modern Western families, right?

So if you guys don't know this story,

they were traveling to Jerusalem for Passover,

and Jesus goes and hangs out at the temple,

and then Joseph and Mary head back to Nazareth where they're from, and they don't discover for three days that they're missing Jesus, and they have to run back to Jerusalem and look everywhere until they find him in the temple. And so a lot of people look at this, and they're like, what in the world kind of parents are these? How do you not notice that your child's gone and how do you lose them for three days?

And there's a really interesting quote that I just read from Robert Keely about this.

He says, the spiritual life of the family in first century Israel was not limited to the small

nuclear family unit as we see it today. The festivals reminded the people of God's faithfulness

were national affairs and their celebrations were community events.

Both Jesus' family and the larger community took responsibility for his spiritual development.

With American families so isolated from extended family and heritage today,

belonging to and connecting with a faith, tradition, and community takes on a radical importance

in giving us and our children the ability to develop our identity, purpose, and community takes on a radical importance in giving us and our children

the ability to develop our identity, purpose, and direction. I think what he's saying here,

you guys, is that what probably Mary and Joseph really cared a lot about and what just in their

culture, what mattered a ton was identity, and that this was being reinforced by their community

and by the extended family.

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