Category: Advent
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Our Family’s Advent Favorites (for kids 0 – 16 years old)
Are you ready for the Christmas Countdown?!? In this post, I’m sharing the heart-and-soul of our Advent traditions and four of our favorite Advent resources for kids. We return to these treasures over and over again as we prepare for Christmas Day. I hope you find something here to enjoy as part of your own…
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A “Both/And” Christmas
We open our arms to receive the fullness… Christmas is both a humble holiday (God becoming a man, the manger, the stable) and a catastrophically extravagant holiday (the multitude of heavenly hosts, the virgin birth, GOD becoming a man!, the powerful King Herod wreaking havoc, the dreams, the rescue, the miraculous star, the astronomers who…
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The Fourth Sunday of Advent
The lights around our house, the lights around our Advent wreath, and the lights in our hearts grow brighter and brighter! On this, the fourth Sunday of Advent, we will light the candles at our dinner table and enjoy a special meal together, especially savoring warm fresh bread. This day, we celebrate Jesus Coming to…
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An Advent Prayer
I keep a copy of Walter Brueggemann’s Awed to Heaven, Rooted in Earth on my nightstand. He has written exquisite prayers that awaken the bumbling prayers in my own soul that are still looking around for the right words. I’m grateful to prayer-writers who have the gift of thinking well about God, and help the…
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The Third Sunday of Advent
They’ll twinkle as little eyelids flutter into dreamland. They’ll remind our sweet little girls that they are beloved. Tomorrow night, we will hang lights in the girls’ room tomorrow. Wrapping them up and around the rafters; trailing the chord down the wall to the outlet. As Christmas carols play, and we bring warmth and holiday…
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Begin with One Child
Just this year, we’ve begun sponsoring a child through Compassion International. Because we want our children to wear Christ’s burden. We want our family to respond to His heart. We want our lives to display His glory. And this is a humble, and, yes, easy way to begin… a timid step towards others; a quavering…
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Giving To The World
Last year, Ann Voskamp of A Holy Experience (read everything she writes) inspired me to order the catalogs from various ministries that provide food and resources for poor and needy people around the globe. On Christmas morning, we sat on the couch and paged through the catalogs, deciding as a family what we could give:…
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The Second Sunday of Advent
This week, we celebrate that Jesus Comes to Forgive Sins. With a fire crackling in the chiminea, chairs drawn up close, and hot chocolate in hands, we’ll talk more personally about our sin, confessing our sins to one another and praying for each other, so that we may be healed. We will rejoice that the…
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May I Give a Gift Like Mary
When Mary of Bethany poured ointment on Christ’s feet, anointing Him for His imminent burial, she said “yes†to the cross. Her gift said “yes†to the prophecies, “yes†to the miracles, “yes†to the suffering, “yes†to the redemption, “yes†to Jesus Christ of Nazareth – our ransom from Heaven. In her actions, she…
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The First Sunday of Advent
Tomorrow night, we will decorate and light our Christmas tree. Each ornament symbolizes a good and beautiful memory in our lives, but the prick of the pine needles will remind us that life has also contained sorrow and pain. We will talk about the cost of our sin, and the way in which death has…
