Michael Dupont has spent a lifetime looking for Joseph.

He couldn't find him in devotionals. He couldn't find him in commentaries. The man who raised the Son of God — who held him, taught him, protected him across desert roads and through the shadow of Herod's soldiers — had been passed over in silence. Michael needed more than a footnote. He needed a story.

So, in 1998, he made a promise to God to write one.

What followed was close to 30 years of research, study, and honest delay. He read the apocryphal Gospels. He studied the ancient world, its religions, its politics, its textures of daily life. He plotted and planned. He set deadlines and missed them. And through it all, the story waited — scrawled in notepads, saved to floppy disks, carried quietly forward one page at a time.

He discovered many things about Joseph's world that most readers don't stop to consider. As an example; when a puppet king spends political capital to kill babies, he makes sure he got the right one. The flight into Egypt was no vacation. It was a chase.

Michael grew up with his father coming home smelling like sawdust — a carpenter's son who never forgot what that kind of man looks like. He has been married for almost four decades and is the father of four accomplished children.