One thing I learned when I tried to write our story

Did you know that a typical screenplay has about 40 scenes or scene sequences in total?

Unlike lining up batteries (positive to negative) the scenes should line up so that one starts on a high (positive emotional value) and ends on a low, and the next begins low and ends high. 

This year I began sticking index cards to my wall, arranging them into scenes and sequences that would eventually become the backbone of a screenplay. This was perhaps the biggest learning experience of 2020 for me.

Even if a lot of tears hit the keyboard while I was doing it.

Longing to retell the story of our experience with Blake, his aneurism, coma, and 48 day hospital stay, I pored over every Facebook update, reread countless prayers in my journal, and reconstructed the details of all the life and emotion packed into the journey.

Tears were expected.

Then came the part I wasn’t expecting. Sometimes in order to tell a story in a way that fits inside a structure in terms of time or character count, choices have to be made. Not every moment and person can be included.

And you may have to make a choice between telling it the way it happened, or for the sake of time or interest or character development, you might have to make a change. 

When it came time for me to make a creative choice, I found myself thinking about what I wanted at the time, what God actually wrote, and it always seemed – His way of writing the story was so much more beautiful than mine. 

At the time, it was painful. So. So. Painful.

But now? I see how it was so much more meaningful than what I would have written if He had handed me the pen in the days when it was all actually happening in our lives.

For many of us, 2020 has been a “How long, Oh, Lord?” kind of year. 

You know what?

The Book of Psalms is full of Psalms of Lament and Psalms of Praise – Lament outnumbers Praise in the early part of the book, but then the Praise ones outnumber the Psalms of Lament as the book progresses toward its conclusion. 

As we reflect on a year that has been very different, and for many of us, very hard, perhaps we all need reminding that there is space for whatever we are feeling. 

There is a time for lament, and a time for praise. And sometimes, it’s the same time.

Hallelujah for Advent! We can pour out praises to Jesus for coming down to Earth. Hallelujah, for Lament! We can also pour out our hearts in honesty, asking God to continue His great rescue plan, to do a new thing and to remake this world the way He intended in the beginning.

Who would believe God would choose to write this story? The Great Rescue plan hinged on sending a tiny baby, like a loaf of bread, to the House of Bread, Bethlehem.

He became the Bread of Life that would be broken for the world.

This life in between can be so challenging, friends. It’s true. I hope you can take courage in the knowledge that God is actively, intimately acquainted with the details of your story. 

Even when it’s painful at the time, He so often uses postponement to make the best become possible.

Reflecting on the journey this year, I’m more convinced than ever. We can be honest, we can be patient, and we can trust: the Lord, the Lord our God? 

He writes the best stories.

P.S. If you’re in gift-giving mode, I’d love to welcome you to visit my 2020 Holiday Gift Guide. It has ideas for different ages and budgets and I hope it’ll be a helpful slice of inspiration for you! Peace and GRACE to you today, friend!!! Click the link below to see the Holiday Guide and Grab the Hassle Free Holiday Guide I created to help you plan and prepare for more peace during the holidays!

Some posts on my site contain affiliate links. When you click on those links to make purchases, I receive compensation at no extra cost to you. I love it when you do that! Thank you for your love and support!

When We Can’t Give Our Kid What He Wants for Christmas (But we want to)

It was like I’d been holding my breath for too long. I slurped in a big gasp of air and squeezed back tears fighting their way to the surface.

All because someone asked my nine-year-old what he wanted for Christmas.

His surprising response?

“Oh, I know! My left-side vision back!”

All the hard things we will ever have to face on earth, if we let them, will bring us back to the place where we ask ourselves the same question Adam and Eve did.

Is God really good?

We squeeze our fists tightly around promises like this one from Psalm 84:11 – 

For the Lord God is a sun and shield; The Lord will give grace and glory; No good thing will He withhold From those who walk uprightly. 

And then, life seems not good, and the serpent is right there whispering in our ear, “Did God really say…” which seems like a different way of asking, “Is God really good? Does God really love you?”

And the hard thing is, at some point in our lives, it’s probably going to feel like the answer to that question is “Nope.”

When you lose someone you love way too soon. Or you get the diagnosis that seems impossible to face.

Or your kid asks for something for Christmas you couldn’t give him, even if you had all the money in the world.

Our souls were created to live in a garden with God, in perfection, and sin shattered that perfect world. As C.S. Lewis put it: 

If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. […] I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that country and to help others to do the same.” {Mere Christianity}

The tension we feel is appropriate and real: the world as you and I know it isn’t the world as it was meant to be.

As we begin this Advent season, we can remember the reason Christ came. The reason Jesus slipped into the world, a baby in a manger, was to begin the unraveling of all the wrongs, to invite us to join Him in that beautiful country yet to come, where no children go to sleep hungry, where hospitals don’t exist, where all the hurt comes untrue.

In the meantime, we learn to trust in God’s way: His is the postponement that makes the best become possible. 

If we can’t give our kids the thing they want most for Christmas this year…

Or we can’t see the people we want most this year…

Or things just aren’t how we want them to be this year…

we can choose to believe God doesn’t withhold good things. He is actively with us here, always, always God with us, always always writing a better story than we could ask for or imagine.

P.S. If you haven’t already, I’d love to welcome you to grab the Hassle-Free Holiday Guide I created to help you organize the to-do’s around this season so that you can enjoy the moments that make it most meaningful. It’s free… and it’s pretty darn helpful! Merry Christmas!

Some posts on my site contain affiliate links. When you click on those links to make purchases, I receive compensation at no extra cost to you. I love it when you do that! Thank you for your love and support!

Three Things to Remember if You’re Searching for the Perfect Christmas This Year

There’s this image deep in the recesses of my mind, that’s as much a feeling as it is a picture like you’d see on a post card. It changes a little every year, but underneath the trappings and trimmings somewhere, I see children that belong to me with clean faces and Christmas jammies. There’s hot chocolate and maybe popcorn and the tree is sparkling near the fireplace. Lights twinkle. The family is together and Christmas music is playing and we’re snuggling under blankets on the couch watching a movie or the kids are putting together puzzles on the coffee table while their affectionate Mama and Daddy look on. It’s cozy and there’s good food and no one fights or hollers and nothing is uneasy or unsettling.

Most of you probably know, if you have a kid or two, or honestly, if you’re just a human that spends any amount of time in the company of other humans, the idyllic pictures we can create for ourselves in our minds might be a possibility with some stretch of the imagination — but those picture-perfect moments never last long. Someone is going to spill the whole ginormous bowl of popcorn and someone is going to be upset because I wanted to put that ornament on the tree or because She is still looking at me or because He called me [fill in the blank] again. And while those sentences might make it sound like it’s the kids who wreak havoc on all visions of candy-cane-and-sugar-coated bliss, we know we grownups don’t make it much easier.

If you find yourself wanting to chew your nails off in dreaded anticipation of doing everything possible (and then some) to make Christmas perfect and still knowing it is going to fall hopelessly short of that Currier & Ives Post Card in your mind, I have a few thoughts that I hope will help change your mind about what the Perfect Christmas looks like.

1. It is Broken, and You Can’t Truly Fix It

If you read no further than this statement, let this be as far as you get:

We are imperfect people in an imperfect world. This is why we need Jesus. This is why Christmas happened.

If you find yourself wondering why you never feel settled, always feel like something’s missing, can’t create perfection no matter how hard you try, know that it’s because this world is flawed. Broken. Messed up. Troubled in a million ways. You weren’t made for this. We inherited sin and brokenness the day we were born. But this isn’t what we were made for.

We are homesick for these feelings of total comfort, total acceptance, and lasting peace, because somewhere inside our broken spiritual condition, there’s a part of us that knows things could be better, perhaps even should be better. Our nostalgia might tell us there was beautiful perfection somewhere in our childhood, and as adults we struggle to recreate it. Or, we lose a loved one, and with that loss feel as if there is a perfect piece of our lives now gone, never possible again. But the problem is deeper still.

C.S. Lewis described this “spiritual homesickness” in his sermon, “The Weight of Glory” like this:

“Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books and the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things–the beauty, the memory of our own past–are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself….Now we wake to find…[w]e have been mere spectators. Beauty has smiled, but not to welcome us; her face was turned in our direction, but not to see us. We have not been accepted, welcomed, or taken in…

Our life-long nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside, is no mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation.”*

If it feels like something is missing in this world, in your life right now, it’s because Something is.

2. You Are Going to Mess Up, Too

We realize our kids are flawed. Our spouses, our family, our friends, they are all flawed. We cannot create “The Perfection” we seek without them — because without their presence it could not be perfect — but then, it can’t be perfect with their presence, either. They are humans, and so am I, so are you. And after a moment’s pause we might realize, even if we’re the only ones here, trying to create Pinterest-perfection for us to enjoy alone, we are still flawed. We will still fall short. This holiday season, days before the Thanksgiving turkey was even carved, I’d already let words fly out of my big mouth, already destroyed the attempts at the perfection I hoped for in time spent with family, already offered a half dozen apologies, already gone to Jesus sorry.

We all mess up.

Last year, I didn’t really want to send a Christmas card, partly because I was getting used to being a Mom of four, but also because I just couldn’t find a picture that felt “perfect.”

I felt like my poor newborn looked like a bald alien! (Perfectionist, much?)

So what are we going to do? Rake ourselves across the coals? Let our frustrations with all the ways things go wrong destroy any chance we have at “Happy Holidays”?

3. Nothing Kills Joy Faster Than Misplaced Expectations

That point following number 3 is not the whole truth — but perhaps it’s a very important part of it. We fool ourselves if we think we can work hard enough to make it all perfect right now. But our ideals about perfection can become the thing that keeps us from the connection that we need, that could help us a feel a little bit more at home in a broken world. We feel our home is too messy or too small or too something — and we avoid welcoming people into it. We want to extend our hands to people living in poverty, maybe not halfway around the world but maybe at least in our own town. But we’re afraid it won’t go well. We’re afraid we’ll get hurt, or do something dumb, or say something wrong. Or maybe the soup kitchen just doesn’t look like that Currier & Ives poster Christmas, so we’re not even going to attempt it.

Fear of things being even harder and even less perfect stops us from giving ourselves, giving our time, considering foster care, doing big things, and saying yes to Jesus in one way or another.

Two weeks ago I spent a morning at a Christmas play put on by adults with social, or mental difficulties. Although there were wonderful costumes and live animals and interesting lighting and effects, the play wasn’t perfect. There were long delays between scenes. Lines were not delivered by Hollywood actors and actresses. There was a hiccough or two along the way.

But I wept more than once, watching it all unfold, listening to these beautiful people put on a play that told an amazing story about God’s Plans — always so much greater than ours. From these humble and precious souls, a story of lives changing, and the story of Jesus unfolded side by side, and my heart pounded in my chest.

As the song “Mary Did You Know?” played, a man playing Jesus stood at the bottom of the stage, surrounded by other cast members. As the lines “the blind will see, the deaf will hear, the dead will live again… the lame will leap, the dumb will speak the praises of the lamb….” so Jesus touched the people surrounding Him and they walked away joyful, changed, with lifted arms, and shouts of Praise God! escaping from happy voices.

I squeezed the four-year-old sitting in my lap a little tighter and absolutely wept.

This is the message. This is the beauty of the Christmas story. 

This is it: Jesus came. He left all the perfection of heaven to enter into our incredibly imperfect world. We fall so short. We are not as kind as we want to be. As gentle as we ought to be. As generous as we need to be. We hurt each other and we’re flawed and fallen and failing. We are NOT PERFECT.

But we can offer Him what we have. We can offer Jesus our broken, selfish selves, and say “Your will be done.” Mother Teresa prayed that Christ would constrain her in such a way that she would never, ever say No to Him.

We can also say Yes. And we can offer ourselves to Him, and be poured out to the world around us. Like the bread at the Communion table, Jesus can choose us, bless us, and break us to feed a multitude.

We should not expect a Perfect Christmas. Jesus didn’t come to make this life perfect. He came to change the world in such a way that when all is said and done, there will be a new heaven and a new earth, and millions of souls will know He came to rescue them. He came to make all things new. He came to set us right with God.

How do we wrap all this up with a bow? What are our lives supposed to look like? Truly, we can only wrap our selves, our hearts up with a bow, and offer them back to Jesus.

Jesus, help me to follow you.

Jesus, I’m so scared, but help me not to say No to you.

Jesus, Yes. Help me say Yes.

Jesus, thank You.

——

From our home to yours, Merry Christmas, friends.

xCC

*Quotes from C.S. Lewis’s The Weight of Glory as found in Timothy Keller’s The Prodigal God.

One Great Way to Unwrap Presence This Christmas

Each year, with more little eyes and more little ears and more little feet padding their way around our nest, I’ve been hungry to find traditions that would celebrate this most wonderful time of the year with reverence and sincerity. The commercialism seems to get bolder. The advertising seems to get better. And a few weeks ago, my eldest asked if he could start working on his wish list with some help from Amazon. Again.

We do our best to do give our children some {read: not a lot of} meaningful, purposeful gifts this season (I’m planning another post to share some of our favorite useful/educational ideas with you) but what I don’t want Christmas to be all about at the Collie house is presents.

I keep asking this one thing:

How do we glorify the Presence and de-emphasize the presents?

We’ll hang lights and remember the Light coming into our dark world.

An ever-green tree will go up, and we’ll remember the One who died on a tree, and how that tree gives us ever-lasting life.

I’m hungry to communicate the greatness of this incredible Presence — the arrival of the Messiah. This changes everything.  This is why we want to lead lives that honor God. This is why we want to show kindness to the least of these.

book2

Years ago, I tried creatively placing the little elf around the house. It just wasn’t a good fit. I’ve watched in subsequent years as folks decorated with powdered sugar footprints, came up with creative stunts, and competed to post the best imagery of elf shenanigans on social media. For us, it continued to emphasize the presents. Be good for the presents. The elf is watching. I just couldn’t put so much effort into something that –for me– felt like it was pointing away from the place I was trying to direct these little hearts’ attention.

Could there be a bright alternative?

Could we aim to de-emphasize the stacks of presents? Because this Presence — it’s the greatest present of all time!

Two years ago, in the days leading up to Christmas, we started a new tradition around the Collie house. One that draws a line from the Creation to the Cross, and sheds new light on the meaning of the manger.

book

Sometimes right after breakfast, sometimes when we’re back in PJs at the end of the day, we dive into Unwrapping the Greatest Gift, by Ann Voskamp. Starting December 1st, we’re led through a lesson each day, right up to the 25th. As a tangible part of the experience, you’re invited to create your own Jesse Tree — a tree you’ve made, perhaps from branches in your backyard — where you can hang ornaments (more on those in a second) that relate to each of the daily devotions you’ll read as a family. The activities related to each lesson involve things like praying about ways your family can give and serve others over the holidays (and all year long) and making a list of things you’re grateful for.

Exactly as I’d hoped, it created these great opportunities for meaningful connection with our kids at Christmas.

Did we check every item off the list, accomplish every activity and turn it into a this.must.happen thing to add stress to the holidays?

Nope.

But when we took the time to sit down together, to be still and to think and to talk, it did facilitate meaningful conversations, and provide this illustration that I believe will be re-introduced to our kids each year, so that it will be ingrained in their hearts permanently, as the true reason for the season.

In the sitting still and reflecting I just felt like… this is what I want to do most in this season.

I want to point to the one thing I want my children to know in this season: Jesus is the Greatest Gift.

ornament1

Last year I hot-glued some felt to some cardboard to create the most awesomely rough-looking Jesse Tree you’ve ever seen… but my children love it.

tree1

I’m very excited to do this together again, as a family, this holiday season. Last year the kids loved the beautifully illustrated book, loved the thoughts to discuss and family activities, and loved coloring the paper ornaments (available for you to print for free from aholyexperience.com). I loved that it was all written to point to the significance of the coming of the Messiah, a constant encouragement to anticipate and celebrate the arrival of Christ.

book4

So friends, if you’re hoping to introduce some new traditions into your Advent Season, or if you’ve been on the fence pondering this book for a while, please consider this my whole-hearted recommendation. Unwrapping the Greatest Gift has been a gift to our family, and I’m excited to have found something to help our family truly celebrate the Savior this season. I’m genuinely excited to share it with you!

And? I’d love to hear from you! Have any questions for me? Are you hungry to put more meaning into your celebrations this season? What is your family doing to point to the Christ in Christmas?

xCC

P.S. In addition to Unwrapping the Greatest Gift, Voskamp’s book, The Greatest Gift, was released two years ago. This devotional is about “Unwrapping the Full Love Story of Christmas” and was written with adults in mind. It was named the Christian Retailer’s Devotional of the Year for 2014 and is absolutely worth considering in addition to the family celebration, or on its own. (They do cover the same themes and correlate to one another, but they are definitely not the same book.) The devotion draws you in to deeply considering the meaning of the lineage of Christ, and the love story of His coming. If you’re looking for something special for yourself in this season, perhaps for that early morning cup of coffee on the couch moment, I highly recommend this!


This post contains affiliate links, but I’m sharing my honest-to-goodness heartfelt opinions. When you click on those links to make your purchases, I receive compensation at no extra cost to you. I love it when you do that! Thank you for supporting With Love!

If You Need to Be Reminded That This, Too, Is A Season

Outside the window, it seems like yesterday, November’s naked branches were arching up toward the sky like arthritic fingers. I delighted in those dogwood flowers when they showed off their dazzling pink hues this spring, and smiled at the verdant life and color of the bright green leaves that shaded the grass beneath all summer. Fall came along and those leaves quickly dried and darkened, and quick as a flash, December arrived, trees gnarled and naked again.

I look forward to life coming to those branches once more, to looking out the window and smiling as the trees seem to blush like half a dozen bridesmaids scattered about our lawn in coordinating shades of pink.

There’s a bit of time that needs passing before we get there.

December. For some folks, it’s the most wonderful time of year. These are the days they count down toward, look forward to. You know the ones — the folks who have an extra sparkle in their eyes as October draws to a close. The first to get the tree up, the last to take it down.

christmas 002

For others, this is the most depressing season of all — the season that brings reminders of days that seemed warmer and brighter and happier in some distant past. Folks thinking of faces that won’t be gathering around the table this year. Traditions that feel broken because that certain someone’s not around to make them happen.

Nearly three years ago I spent a week wandering in and out of a hospital room where my Dad lay barely breathing. The days stretched long with spritzes of hand sanitizer and transitions to the lobby to nurse a three-month-old, more hand sanitizer and transitions to a room to stare at one of the most important people in my 30-some years of life as he lay dying. I ran into a precious old friend whose Dad had a heart attack the same day, was lying in a bed one floor up. We marveled that we were experiencing the same sufferings.

A few days later her Dad was home, healthy and recovering.

A few days later, my eldest son, just four, was laying my bright yellow tulip on the casket for me because I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.

I watched that friend of mine’s Dad dance at her wedding last year. He’s a kind-hearted and gentle, good man. I was happy to see him again just a few weeks ago. I’m thankful her story was different.

Mine was a season for grieving, hers was a season for gratitude.

babyswinging

Swinging by the tree

Our precious little fourth bundle of joy arrived seven weeks ago, just a few days after a friend, due two days before me, lost her precious little fourth bundle of joy.

And from far-off corners a dear old friend of mine and I chat over Skype, me introducing baby four to her eighteen-month old, and us grieving together the loss of her second baby at just ten weeks on the inside. Her voice quivers just a little in the telling of it – they don’t know if it was a boy or a girl.

But this she knows and this she says: I could feel God with me through it, and it’s amazing: I’ve never been angry.

Words don’t come easily for me, as we chat away my afternoon in North Carolina, her evening in Stuttgart.

Now is a season of grief, and now is a season of gratitude.

And Advent is the season of the coming — and, for us folks in the northern hemisphere, perhaps it’s no coincidence that this coming takes place very near the absolute shortest, darkest day of the year. The Light of the World showed up when things were at their darkest — and these days, when our world and our lives are at their darkest? They’re the days when we stop to celebrate the coming of the Light.

He arrived during a period known as the Pax Romana — a time when the Roman Empire reached its peak in terms of land area and population, and experienced about 200 years of economic prosperity and peace.

For the people benefiting from Roman rule it was a season of peace, but for those oppressed under Roman rule? Perhaps it wasn’t.

christmastree2011

 

He arrived into peace that only lasted for a season, peace that only existed for some — to bring about peace that will be everlasting. Good News of great joy for all men…

If yours is a season of comfort and joy, good tiding and life and light, be sure to share that goodness with others, for whom the season isn’t so Merry and Bright. Down the street or halfway round the world, or both — celebrate the coming of the Light by shining it wherever you can. Know that this, too, it just a season — share and love and bless and trust that when your season changes others will do the same for you.

If yours is a season where the branches feel naked and gnarled, a season that feels more like grief and less like gratitude, know that it is still exactly this: a season. And right at the start, when the floods dried up and a season of great, worldwide devastation came to an end, a promise came with it:

“While the earth remains,
seedtime and harvest,
cold and heat,
winter and summer,
and day and night,
shall not cease.” {Gen. 8:22}

God promised the seasons would keep coming, and they have. They surely have.

So whether these days feel merry and bright, or you’re feel hard-pressed and discouraged, know that, this, too, is a season, and as a good friend of mine reminded me the other day, we are a weary world, rejoicing.

If yours feels like a weary world, you can still stay in the story, you can still do some rejoicing.

The Good News to all men isn’t just that He came, it’s that He’s coming again.

xCC

If You’re Hungry for the Presence this Christmas

Each year, with more little eyes and more little ears and more little feet padding their way around our nest, I’ve been hungry to find traditions that would celebrate this most wonderful time of the year with reverence and sincerity. The commercialism seems to get bolder. The advertising seems to get better. And a few weeks ago, my eldest asked if he could start working on his wish list with some help from Amazon. Again.

How do we glorify the Presence and de-emphasize the presents?

We’ll hang lights and remember the Light coming into our dark world.

An ever-green tree will go up, and we’ll remember the One who died on a tree, and how that tree gives us ever-lasting life.

I’m hungry to communicate the greatness of this incredible Presence — the arrival of the Messiah. This changes everything.  This is why we want to lead lives that honor God. This is why we want to show kindness to the least of these.

Gifts 005

A few years ago, I tried creatively placing the little elf around the house. It just wasn’t a good fit. I’ve watched in subsequent years as folks decorated with powdered sugar footprints, came up with creative stunts, and competed to post the best imagery of elf shenanigans on social media. For us, it continued to emphasize the presents. Be good for the presents. The elf is watching. I just couldn’t put so much effort into something that –for me– felt like it was pointing away from the place I was trying to direct these little hearts’ attention.

Could there be a bright alternative?

Could we aim to de-emphasize the stacks of presents? Because this Presence — it’s the greatest present of all time!

Last year, in the days leading up to Christmas, we started a new tradition around the Collie house. One that draws a line from the Creation to the Cross, and sheds new light on the meaning of the manger.

Gifts 003

We dove into Unwrapping the Greatest Gift, by Ann Voskamp and I was so, so glad we did. Starting December 1st, there is a lesson each day, right up to the 25th. As a tangible part of the experience, you’re invited to create your own Jesse Tree — a tree you’ve made, perhaps from branches in your backyard — where you can hang ornaments that relate to each of the daily devotions you’ll read as a family. The activities related to each lesson involve things like praying about ways your family can give and serve others over the holidays (and all year long) and making a list of things you’re grateful for.

Exactly as I’d hoped, it created these great opportunities for meaningful connection with our kids at Christmas.

Did we check every item off the list, accomplish every activity and turn it into a this.must.happen thing to add stress to the holidays?

Nope.

But it did facilitate meaningful conversations, and provide this illustration that I believe will be re-introduced to our kids each year, so that it will be ingrained in their hearts permanently, as the true reason for the season.

It all to points to the one thing I want my children to know in this season: Jesus is the Greatest Gift.

Gifts 002

I’m very excited to do this together again, as a family, this holiday season. Last year the kids loved the beautifully illustrated book, loved the thoughts to discuss and family activities, and loved coloring the paper ornaments (available for you to print for free from aholyexperience.com). I loved that it was all written to point to the significance of the coming of the Messiah, a constant encouragement to anticipate and celebrate the arrival of Christ.

In addition to Unwrapping the Greatest Gift, last year Voskamp’s book, The Greatest Gift, was released. This devotional is about “Unwrapping the Full Love Story of Christmas” and was written with adults in mind. It was named the Christian Retailer’s Devotional of the Year for 2014 and is absolutely worth considering in addition to the family celebration, or on its own. (They do cover the same themes and correlate to one another, but they are definitely not the same book.) The devotion draws you in to deeply considering the meaning of the lineage of Christ, and the love story of His coming.

loved getting up in the morning before the kids, sitting on the couch where I could stare at the Christmas tree shining bright in the still-dark morning, and just beginning my days thinking about how precious this season is, and why. {Whether that will be entirely possible with our new little kitty cat on the scene this year remains to be seen — but here’s trusting I’ll squeeze it in somewhere.}

Gifts 004

So friends, consider this an invitation from me to you to consider welcoming some new traditions into your Advent Season. I’m excited to have found something to help our family truly celebrate the Savior this season and I’m excited to share it with you.

I hope to be able to write and reflect on the glorious goodness of the Savior throughout the season, but I wanted to share this with you now, because there’s still time to grab a copy of one or both of these wonderful books, and allow them to bring your family into some meaningful conversation about the Presence, that might draw focus away from the presents! Don’t worry if you don’t jump in on December 1st!

And? I’d love to hear from you! Have any questions for me? Are you hungry to put more meaning into your celebrations this season? What is your family doing to point to the Christ in Christmas?

xCC

 

Just so’s ya knows — This post was not sponsored by Ann Voskamp or Tyndale Publishers. I bought both books and was excited to share them with you in case you’d like to create some new traditions with your family this season. The links to Amazon are affiliate links. You might also find the books priced well at christianbook.com — we just found it cheaper with free shipping at Amazon. 🙂