Joseph's story unfolds in three acts.

He was chosen. He didn't ask to be.

Joseph was a carpenter. A husband. An ordinary man handed an impossible task by heaven itself; and hunted by the most powerful empire on earth.

When Herod's soldiers come for the children of Bethlehem, the puppet king does not leave loose ends. The flight into Egypt is no vacation. It is a chase that is desperate, dangerous, and driven by one man's refusal to let heaven down.

Protecting the Messiah enters the years the Gospels pass over: the fear, the faith, and the grit of a father protecting what God has placed in his hands. Historical fiction rooted in Scripture, shaped by adventure and the hardship of the ancient world.

This is the story you didn't know was missing.

Joseph has spent a lifetime preparing Jesus for what is coming by teaching him the Law, the history, the weight of his people's expectations. A deliverer. A king. A warrior who will break Rome's grip and restore Israel to her glory.

But the young man in his workshop has other ideas.

Preparing the Messiah follows Jesus through his teenage years, the restless years, the searching years, the years when a son must become his own man. Joseph will fight to hold the shape of what he believes the Messiah must be. Jesus will stubbornly and lovingly refuse it. And underneath it, the slow, dawning recognition that the destiny Joseph has been preparing his son for is nothing like what either of them imagined.