WOW, it's been three months since last posting. It's hard to believe we are into the holiday season already. To catch you up...we wrapped up the fall soccer season and jumped right into the basketball season, we enjoyed watching two of the boys participate in their first musical production for school, we enjoyed Thanksgiving with our families, and much more.
Our lives are consistently busy these days. The busyness seems to increase with the ages of our children and their involvement in various things. There is not anything that is in our schedules that I would say is bad or wasteful of our time, yet most of our time is filled with some type of activity. We have even said "no" to a few things because it would take away the one night in a week that we are all together at home. The great thing is that the kids are getting old enough for Aaron and I to get out of the house for short times just the two of us. And God provides unexpected moments, like snow days!
Each year during the month of December our family has done an Advent calendar. This is something we have done since Alex and Jack were young. It is the type of calendar with windows that open and tell the Christmas story. As the days of the month would pass we would "retell" each day and then the kids would take turns opening the current day's window. By Christmas, everyone could say the story from memory. The story had become familiar.
This year we are doing something different. With kids being older, as well as the fact that we felt like we were in a rut of familiarity, we found an Advent devotional online and are using it to guide our family through this season. We are really enjoying it so far and it's great because it is a new, fresh and even bigger perspective of the familiar Christmas story.
Advent means arrival or coming. In the days leading up to the birth of Christ, the people of God were looking forward to His arrival-the First Advent. Today, Advent is traditionally the count down of the four weeks before Christmas, celebrating this first arrival of Jesus. Practically speaking though, Advent should remind us daily to look for His return. We should be using this season of Advent to reset our perspective on Jesus as the center of our lives so we are living a life filled with anticipation and expectation for His second coming.
All too often it is easy to get caught up in the extra busyness of this season, and even in times of reflection on the true meaning of the season we slip into the familiarity of the story. I wonder how often we have heard the passage in Luke 2; maybe even to the point where we could say portions of it from memory. When was the last time that we truly allowed the wonder of this baby born in Bethlehem to penetrate our hearts to the point that we are currently living in anticipation of His return? When was the last time we actually considered the Truth that He is coming again? Does it ever cross our minds in the hectic schedule of our lives? When was the last time the urgency of this Truth changed the way we interacted with people, the way we gave, the way we loved? And shouldn't it?
