When you visit an art gallery (or even a friend’s home) and admire the pictures on the wall, do you ever think about what hardware they used to hang the portraits? When they introduce the starting lineup at a football game, who gets more cheers: the quarterback or the center? When you tour a new home, does the realtor show off the master bedroom or the water heater closet? When you watch the Academy Awards, who gets more accolades: the Best Actor in a Lead Role or the Best Actor in a Supporting Role?

Some of our lives resemble the portraits, quarterbacks, master bedroom and Best Lead Actor. Others of us are the framing hardware, center position and water heater closet … we play a Supporting Role in this drama called Life. Don’t feel bad, though, because these supporting roles are still very important to the plot. After all, how could we admire the portraits without the nail to display them? What would the quarterback do without the center to hike the ball? You get the idea.

As we continue the next few weeks of advent season, there is one very important supporting role that needs to be mentioned, because without him, there would be no Christmas story. Joseph’s ancestry helped to validate Jesus’ lineage in a time when women were seldom even mentioned in genealogy (Luke 3:23-38, for example). Without Joseph, Mary would likely have been stoned to death – or at the very least, outcast – for becoming pregnant out of wedlock (Matthew 1:19).

Joseph worked in a blue collar trade (carpentry), and although I don’t know a lot about the betrothal process back in those days, who wouldn’t want their daughter to marry a humble, hard-working man with a steady job? His life work was a supporting role, so perhaps that’s another reason why God chose him and Mary as Jesus’ parents, because he was willing to serve in that capacity. Unfortunately, we know very little about Joseph’s life, and he isn’t mentioned beyond Jesus’ preteen years, so perhaps he died relatively young. The typical lifespan in those days was much shorter than it is today, and besides, carpentry can be dangerous. At any rate, Joseph had a role to fulfill in the Messiah story, and he performed it beautifully. He accepted Mary as his wife, despite the cultural mores of the time, and raised Jesus as his own.

Like Joseph, not all of us will be lead actors, but that doesn’t mean that God left us out of his storyline. We each have a purpose to fulfill! Be open to the role God has for you, even if it goes against the grain of what you might have expected.