4 Ways to Help Them Know OF Him

1. I LOVE the Jesse Tree Idea. 
I took Anne Voskamps Advent Calendar Printables and some more easily colored Jesse tree Coloring Pages. I had Jack color a few pages and we cut them out and put some ribbon through holes in the top. TWhile walking our dog, Jack and I picked up a few good sticks and then I tied them together with some rope. I put it in a galvanized pail I had, and surrounded the sticks with some leftover Rafia I also had. I found some christmas lights for $2.00 and I helped Jack string his tree with lights.

Then I matched the stories from the Jesse Tree to the Stories in his Storybook Bible. I labeled each story with the corresponding Advent day.

Since we don't have Jack ALL the time, I cut down on some of the stories, and filled the calendar days that we don't have him with bits of chocolate, and craft projects for ornaments he could make. Like a toilet paper crown with scrapbook Sticker Gems for Esthers Crown, and some Rafia and ribbon to make a Bundle of Wheat for Ruth to Hang on the Tree, Some Calendar dates I also put a note in so that he knows what we will be doing the following day, like cutting down a Christmas Tree or Decorating Cookies for the Cookie Social.

I also hid the christ-child that goes in the manger in day 24 of his advent calendar. (He thinks it's a piece of candy and that we lost the Christ Child because he couldn't find it with the other pieces)

He puts an ornament on the tree and then we read the story together. He also enjoys listening to devotionals from Jesus Calling and LOVES to find the scriptures in the Bible and read them out loud. I help him out with the hard words, but for the most part, she picked some 6 year old friendly bible verses.

(Pictures will come when the weather isn't so Dreary and I can get a non-fuzzy pic with my not so awesome camera phone)

I also really like "Truth in The Tinsel." Though it is really hard to do when we only really get good time with The Kid every other week, so it is hard to fit everything in. We did it last year, but are not doing it this year.

2. Wrap 25 Christmas Books Up  
and have your child pick a book every evening to read before they go to bed.

 I tried to mix it up a little bit because The Kid gets a little uneasy when he hears "Too Much" about Jesus. His catch phrase is "Why are we talking about his again?"  Many of the books I dug out of the books my parents read me when I was a kid, the rest of them are books that I borrowed or found at this great Christian Thrift Store $1 for softcover, $2 for Hardcover, BOGO free!!! I scour their Christmas collection every year.

Our Favorite Books Are:
The Littlest Angel 
and
Santa and the Christ Child
Both books take some secular ideas and point us back to Christ. They are great children's classics. I believe The Littlest Angel is also a cartoon on Netflix.

3. Create an Advent Chain
to decorate the house to help us remember who Jesus is. I love this one from Spell Out Loud.

4. Purchase or create an Advent Wreath.
Here is a great tutorial on the Advent Wreath. Reading the scriptures can be a little tedious before you eat dinner, since everyone is hungry and waiting for Sunday dinner. It might be better to do it as a weekly family devotional time.  I think it is SO important to HEAR scripture being read. It makes it come alive, it makes it understandable to big and little ears alike.

I didn't really know about Advent wreaths until I went to college at Saint Mary's College in Notre Dame Indiana. They did Chistmas right there! When I came home for Christmas I WANTED an Advent Wreath. My Dad found a beautiful Advent wreath with children of the world holding up ribbons with the themes of advent. I just found one at the thrift store for $8 recently. We usually stick a bigger, more sparkly candle in the center of the wreath and surround it with greenery. That's our Christmas Candle.

Here is something similar to the Advent wreath idea.

CHRISTmas Traditions to help out the elf on the shelf...or the Grinch.

On Sunday our Pastor tried to make a joke as he was talking about the Adoration of Christ during the Advent Season. He said the month of the December our culture just expects people to talk about Jesus and that, as Christians we should saturate our traditions in the Gospel so that everything we do points to Christ, and then he said, "make the elf on the shelf point to Jesus." No one laughed. Honestly, I think it was more poingent than it was funny. He said, "Our culture has dropped Christ from Christmas because WE have dropped Christ from Christmas"

I LOVE Christmas and I LOVE the movie elf. I LOVE the movie elf ALMOST as much as I love Christmas.

My husband thinks I'm absolutely nuts because I draw in my bible. Granted, I have a Journaling Bible which allows me to work specifically in the margins but...sometimes I draw right over top of the scriptures. I use colored pencils so I can read the text underneath....but he thinks it's insane. He also thinks it's a little anal for me to try to find godly meaning in our Christmas traditions. I am generally given a tight budget to spend on Christmas Ornaments, so my dream of owning Ann Voskamp's "Greatest Gift" Paper Ornaments are pretty much out of financial reason and so is my fantasy of owning hand blown ornaments representing the symbols of the Jesse Tree attached with their perspective bible verses. The hubs thinks hand blown ornaments are "tacky." I tell him he's a Grinch.

 The Grinch hated Christmas! The whole Christmas season!

Now, please don't ask why. No one quite knows the reason.

Seriously, our Christmas personalities are like this:

ME

THE HUBS

While the hubs likes to put on a facade that he doesn't quite care, he spends hours cutting out my little Ann Voskamp printables with an exacto knife to finish off our Family Jesse (Christmas)Tree. He sits around the dinning table with me as we ice the sugar cookies and requests Gingerbread Houses to be made just like his mom did.

I really feel like he's secretly like this:

          

             So Cute!

My Hero!

How do we soften our hearts among the presents and the wrapping paper and the cookies and the parties? How do we spend the month pointed towards a helpless baby: The King of Kings. How do we teach our children that what our culture does should have no bearing on what we do in our homes, and how we share the story of the gospel with those God brings us in contact with.

Wouldn't it be great if on Christmas Day our kids were like: 

JESUS!!!!!!!!!! I KNOW HIM!!!!! I KNOW HIM!!!!!!!!

I want the kid to KNOW HIM! KNOW Him know Him. Like "I see you!" in the movie Avatar. 

God WANTS us to Know him like that. He WANTS us to have the same relationship as Adam and Eve had with Him in the garden before the fall.

If I KNEW Him, shouldn't I be SO excited for Christmas? Shouldn't I spend my weeks before Christmas anticipating the arrival of the Christ Child? Shouldn't I celebrate to remember? 

'Now this day will be a memorial to you, and you shall celebrate it as a feast to the LORD; throughout your generations you are to celebrate it as a permanent ordinance. Exodus 12:14

They celebrate your abundant goodness and joyfully sing of your righteousness. Psalm145:7 NIV

'Then on the fifteenth day of the seventh month you shall have a holy convocation; you shall do no laborious work, and you shall observe a feast to the LORD for seven days. Number 29:12

Go Tell it On the Mountain

Ummmm....exactly Buddy.

So Christmas comes, and it's okay to be excited about it! It's okay to be excited that the a Child is born to us THIS day, even though it's not THE day. It's our day of remembrance, our memorial, our feasting to the Lord, our eating and our drinking, and our giving. Give abundantly and Cheerfully.

and instead of being anti-materialistic anti-secular anti-X-mas help people feel like:

How do we help our Kids KNOW Him during this Christmas Season?

In the midst of baking cookies, and wrapping presents, and decorating, I want my heart to worship the one who all of this is for, I want to KNOW Him. I want to ENGAGE WITH Him. I want to GLORIFY Him, and I want to GROW to be more Like Him.

Check back in tomorrow for "4 Ways to Help them Know Of Him" and then "4 Ways to Help them Engage with Him" and then "4 Ways to Glorify Him" and finally "4 Ways to be Like Him"



I know this is weird.....but this song could definitely serve as a prayer.

When God Showed Up to My Wedding: Part IV My Cake Fell Over

So here's the story:

I wanted my wedding Cake from the Cakery Bakery. They have THE BEST cake in the entire world! The frosting, I'm sure, is the kind of frosting the angels put on cakes in heaven. DELICIOUS!

I ordered a Red Velvet Wedding Cake with Creamy White Vanilla Icing. A fondant burgundy yarn was going to wrap around the cake and end in a little heart. The top layer of the cake was going to have the Bible verse we had picked out piped onto it with a big M in the middle.

The bottom of the cake was going to look like a creamy knit sweater.

I saw my cake for 5 minutes. I was IN LOVE with it and couldn't wait for the next day when I would walk into the reception room and cut a little piece off and feed it to my new husband as the cake was whisked away to be sliced for the rest of the guests at our reception.

This, however was not to be.

My cake fell over.

After I had been snapped at throughout the day by my mom. After my aunt was late to our house and hadn't called me and I was running late to check out the flowers, after packing a van full of unnecessary snacks and things I wasn't expecting, after a looong car ride with my grandma, after finding out that my wedding planner AND her assistant were not available, and my promised time of being able to load in and decorate the night before had fallen through...after finding a closet to be alone and freak out in...for a bit....after being almost an hour late to my rehearsal dinner....

My Dad and my aunt flagged the car down. My aunt got out of the car and started talking.

"You're not going to like this...."

*Sigh*

My cake had fallen over. My aunt was driving. My dad was holding the cake carefully....carefully through the resort. As they hit the last unexpected speed bump a little too fast....the cake came crashing into my Dad....he tried to catch it but he just succeeded in squashing it a little more.

My girlfriends ran inside to see if they could do some damage control. Could they fix it?....

I'm guessing it was pretty bad 'cause I wasn't allowed to see it.

I completely lost it! I had had an amazing morning....and everything had pretty much gone downhill since lunch....except my flowers. My flowers were A-MAZING and I LOVED my flowers. I bawled my eyes out....we were now 2 hours late for dinner and I could NOT get ahold of The Hubs.

It's one of those things you know? It's a wedding! Wedding CAKE is mandatory! You dream about it your WHOLE life since you are little. You have cakes at other weddings judging if it's melt in your mouth good enough for your own wedding.

This ENTIRE process I had been praying AND PRAYING that God would show up to my wedding. I did not know what that would look like, but it CERTAINLY did not look like this....

Or did it?

I don't think I will ever be able to comprehend or appreciate how much certain people love me, how much GOD loves me through certain people. I am thoroughly convinced that the night before my wedding was HORRIBLE so that God could take over my entire wedding day into Himself, to have His own quiet time with me, while he loved me and The Hubs through others attentive hands.

When God Showed Up at My Wedding: Series Intro

One of my best friends, Olga called to shoot the breeze. She has barely spoken to me since my wedding, and as much as I used to think that it wasn't appropriate to call anyone after a wedding or a baby for AT LEAST 3 months, I am here to tell you that that is not a necessary gesture. But anyways....

We were talking about my wedding...and I have been far enough removed from it now that I feel like I can begin to write about it. 

I am going to start a series called: "Inviting God to Your Wedding" I will actually start in the dating phase and move on through Engagement, Wedding Planning, the Wedding and the Honeymoon. I will be asking The Hubs to chime in every once in awhile, because, while I was very stubborn, so was he, and he helped out A LOT in the planning and doing process, and had a good amount of say in what was going on.

What I really want to talk about today is a bit of my conversation with Olga. She was telling me that her husband had said that our wedding was the most fun he'd ever had at a wedding. Olga proceeded to tell me that it was so laid back, and it didn't feel forced, and people weren't stressed out...and as she's talking to me....I'm thinking, remembering the weekend, all of the things Olga and the other girls did for me, not asked, but dove in, in the middle of an unforeseen unfortunate/fortunate chain of events. 

You see, the afternoon, evening before my wedding was HORRIBLE. So horrible in fact, that I was over an hour late to our rehearsal dinner, at least thirty minutes of that time spent in the arms of The Hubs bawling my eyes out (the first time he'd ever seen me cry.) 

For ten months I had prayed for God to be a part of our wedding somehow, I had no idea how, but somehow, I wanted Him to show up and love on us, to show us that, He knew He was invited, and he was present. 

And God DID show up! The morning of our wedding, my friend Victoria knocked on the condo door and I fell into her arms with tears in my eyes, and asked her to pray with me, to thank God for how He was showing me love all morning long, as I'm writing this, tears are welling up in my eyes as I contemplate his presence the entire day. 

Most of the time, the unfortunate happens, so that God's glory and love have enough room to be lavishly displayed. In the midst of cakes collapsing, moms snapping, fiance's MIA, wedding coordinators on vacation, or sick etc. etc. etc.....God displayed his AMAZING love, and I want to invite you into my story and extend the invitation to you.

I'll go over practical things like budgeting, and coordinating, as well as spiritual encouragement and blessings through the story of our wedding. :) 

While you're waiting for the first installment, I'll give you a sneak peak!

Photos are taken by Jana Todd at Excellence in Photography