Saving Time For/With The Temple

It took Mary and Joseph three days after they discovered that twelve year old Jesus was missing for them to find Him. I can only imagine the terror that any parent would go through searching for their child for three whole days, but however horrible this kind of experience has been for parents who have spent similar amounts of time trying to find lost children, It must have been significantly worse for Mary and Joseph since the child they misplaced was the Son of God. I don’t know in their frenzied state if Mary and Joseph had some sort of plan for finding Jesus in a bustling city of thousands of people. Perhaps they checked first the place they had been staying, or at the houses of relatives or friends. Maybe they consulted with whatever the first century Jerusalem equivalent of a police station was. But we know that they did not think to visit the temple until the third day of frantic searching, since that was where Jesus had been since they had begun missing Him. Imagine how much time and especially how much pain and anguish Mary and Joseph could have been spared if they had only first made time for visiting the temple. I’m not saying that if a loved one goes missing we need to drop everything and run to the temple and we’ll magically find them right after, but so often we are facing and wrestling with huge and painful problems in our life and we somehow assume that the very last thing we have time for is the temple. When a child is struggling, they don’t hesitate to run to their father or mother for help. When we are struggling, we should run to our Father for help, through prayer, of course, but more directly by visiting and spending time in His house. We may rationalize that we couldn’t possibly afford to spend any of our time int he temple with how frantically outpaced we currently are, but we may find that by saving a little time for the temple, the temple will help us save a lot of time with whatever we happen to be facing. How often are we like Mary and Joseph, looking everywhere but the temple, when what we seek was at the temple the whole time? I know that if we can make God a priority in our life, then God will magnify our efforts and dramatically speed up our ability to solve our problems.