A Real Birthday on Christmas Eve EVE 12-17-06

What a great season of the year! Preparations for Christmas continue and so does the day to day realities of life. Joseph continues with Physical Therapy and Occupational Therapy. The photo is of Joseph and Nikki his occupational therapist at LDS Hospital. They are working on his reawakening right arm. Nikki is dedicated and Joseph is motivated, they make a progressive team. The hard work and miracles continue.

The day before the day before Christmas (Christmas Eve EVE) is Joseph Smith's birthday (December 23rd). Tim's feeling is that in a future millenial day THAT will be the global celebration in December, with the Savior's birthday being celebrated in the Spring (April 6th) where it belongs. It IS a season of remembering the power of a child being born.

President Spencer W. Kimball (quoting F. M. Bareham) said "When a wrong wants righting, or a truth wants preaching, or a continent wants discovering, God sends a baby into the world to do it." Speaking of the birth of Joseph Smith he then said "When theologians are reeling and stumbling, when lips are pretending and hearts are wandering, and people are "running to and fro, seeking the word of the Lord and cannot find it"-when clouds of error need dissipating and spiritual darkness needs penetrating and heavens need opening, a little infant is born. Just a few scattered neighbors in a hilly region in the backwoods even know that Lucy is expecting. There is no prenatal care or nurses; no hospital, no ambulance, no delivery room. Babies live and die in this rough environment and few know about it.
Another child for Lucy! No trumpets are sounded; no hourly bulletins posted; no pictures taken; no notice is given; just a few friendly community folk pass a word along. It's a boy! Little do the brothers and sisters dream that a prophet is born to their family; even his proud parents can little suspect his spectacular destiny. No countryside farmers or loungers at the country store, no village gossips even surmise how much they could discuss, did they but have the power of prophetic vision.
"They are naming him Joseph," it is reported. But no one knows, not even his parents, at this time, that this infant and his father have been named in the scriptures for 3,500 years, named for and known to their ancestor, Joseph, the savior of Egypt and Israel. Not even his adoring mother realizes, even in her most ambitious dreaming and her silent musings, that this one of her children, like his ancestor, will be the chief sheaf of grain to which all others will lean and the one star to which the sun and moon and other stars will make obeisance.
He will inspire hatred and admiration; he will build an empire and restore a church-the Church of Jesus Christ. Millions will follow him; monuments will be built to him; poets will sing of him; authors will write libraries of books about him.
No living soul can guess that this little pinkish infant will become the peer of Moses in spiritual power and greater than many prophets before him. He will talk with God, the Eternal Father, and Jesus Christ, his Son; and angels will be his guest instructors.
His Vermont contemporaries know not that this little one just born will live as few men have lived, accomplish what few men have accomplished, and die as few have ever died, in his own sacred blood in a prison at the hands of assassins as a martyr to everlasting truth.
All expectations are understated. Destiny outdistances all imagination and dreams! . . .
During the unfolding of this Smith-flower; during the brief ripening years of this fruit of the loins of that other Joseph of Israel, the world is preparing for the greatest event since the meridian of time. The triplet infants, Liberty, Freedom, and Justice, are contending for life; a small colonial nation is struggling to its feet; the people from many lands, squirming in the "melting-pot," are firming up, suffering labor pains toward the birth of a divine new program, "a marvelous work and a wonder," the restoration of the gospel in all its far-reaching detail. "We fancy," said Bareham, "God can manage His world only with great battalions, when all the time He is doing it with beautiful babies." (Faith Precedes the Miracle, p.323)

How grateful we are-- as we remember the infant Jesus, born so long ago in a obsure village in the Middle East. and the infant Joseph, in an obscure village in Vermont-- the infant Joseph Shaffer Taggart whose birthday is the end of the month, born in an obsure city in Idaho. God is managing the world.