Yeshua: The Advent (Journey Beyond the Cross Book 1)
There are specific questions for older children as well as younger children. So my 4 and 6 year old are able to listen to the Scripture verse we are studying and digest it's meaning. It's led to a lot of great discussion about sin, Jesus, and God's love for us. As a mom of littles, I really appreciate that each chapter takes only minutes--it keeps their attention and allows them to focus on the one attribute about Jesus for that chapter without getting bogged down in other stuff or losing focus.
And the journaling at the end of each chapter is by far our favorite--my boys LOVE drawing about what they've learned and I love seeing what they come up with! It allows me to see that they really are understanding the concepts. Such a great way to prepare our hearts for Christmas--highly recommend!! With the continued commercialization of Christmas in our culture, even Christians can find themselves looking forward to the peripheral benefits that come along with this season.
We occupy our time by getting together with family and friends, putting up a tree and lights, special programs at churches and schools, to name a few. These are not bad things, but they are lesser things. If we can focus on JESUS during Christmas, these lesser things will be more meaningful while taking their rightful place. These lies are practical statements that the god of this world is speaking into their lives, but they are not without hope.
book through www.farmersmarketmusic.com is humbly appreciated. Grace and Peace in seen an advent calendar hanging somewhere today, one of those calendars with 25 little door . kindnesses throughout the Jesse Tree Journey. .. would one day be in sight of Jesus' Cross, it's renamed the place the Lord Provides. 1: STARS dimmed the stars for us, nor any artificial light beyond flickering fires and oil lamps. The Magi in Matthew's gospel were the sort of people Jesus was talking This Advent, we can journey with the Magi to find God at work, . certainly have had to use camels to cross the desert and would have.
As a family, we've done a number of advent devotions, but this book is exceptional. The devotions are engaging and interesting. They are the perfect length for a busy family, and with graceful simplicity go deep into the gospel and the heart. Thanks to two "levels" of questions, they are great for both older and younger children. Each day, a lie that the serpent tells is countered with the truth as Bible stories which point to the Messiah are shared.
The Gospel is beautifully and clearly woven into each devotion, building the anticipation for Christmas, just as it was longed for so many years ago. I highly recommend it! Our family of 7 kids ages 1 to 13 loved our A Jesus Christmas devotional. It is rock solid in terms of scripture and uniquely allowed us to examine a lie told by Satan versus a truth of Christmas that invalidates the lie. There were questions for younger children and older children as well as some that invite the parents to share to get the discussion going. One of the other unique aspects of this devotion is the journaling page for each day.
The kids and parents loved brainstorming and creating images that reflected what had been discussed. Please include this info in a credit line: With Advent not far around the corner, I want to let you know that I will be offering a new online retreat for the season!
A Jesus Christmas
The Illuminated retreat will intertwine writing, art, music, and community, creating spaces of reflection and rest that you can enter into from anywhere you are, in the way that works best for you. This online retreat is not about adding one more thing to your holiday schedule! It is about helping you find spaces for reflection that draw you deep into this season that shimmers with mystery and possibility. Offering a space of elegant simplicity as you journey toward Christmas, the Illuminated retreat fits easily into the rhythm of your days.
Individual, group, and congregational rates are available. Friends, thank you so much for traveling through Advent and Christmas with me here at The Advent Door! I am grateful for the blessing of your company in this past season. I especially want to let you know about a gift I have for you! You can download it as a PDF. There is no cost for the retreat.
The Path We Make by Dreaming. I pray that in this new year, you will find wondrous dreams to live into. I am so grateful for you and am sending many blessings your way. An annual subscription enables you to download any images for use in worship during the year. At The Advent Door, our focus across the years has been on the readings from Isaiah 9, Luke, and John, and these are listed below.
John pares away the Christmas story to its essence: Glory and grace and truth. Advent has taken us on an extraordinary journey through the stories and images this season offers us. Apocalypse and anticipation, wilderness and way-makers, rejoicing and ruin-raising, angels and annunciations and more: By the time Christmas Eve and Christmas Day arrive, it all comes down to this: God has come to us, has taken flesh in this world, has arrived as the light for which we have longed.
No matter how shadowed our road may have become, no matter how perilous or lonely or long, that is cause for celebration. It has been—well, shall we say illuminating? How it accompanies us even when we cannot see it. How it begins in the beating of our heart, in the marrow of our bones, long before we can perceive it.
I have gathered up these Christmas Eve and Christmas Day reflections here for you. I offer them with blessings, with gratitude, and with prayers that Christ our Light will meet us in these days. O my friends, Merry Christmas! Light Has Shined Christmas Eve: Where the Light Begins Christmas Day: Shines in the Darkness Christmas Day: How the Light Comes Christmas Day: An Illuminated Joy Christmas Day: The Book of Beginnings.
A few years ago, I created a blessing for the Winter Solstice. To visit this blessing, click this image or the title below:. Blessing for the Longest Night. Lectionary readings for Advent 4, Year B: What must it have been like to walk a way she could hardly perceive, while carrying within herself—in her heart and womb and bones— a light unlike any the world had ever seen? Revisiting the passages from Luke that appear in the readings for Advent 4, I have been struck all over again by how much the Christmas story hinges on hope. The hope that inspires her to sing of the restoration of the world as if it has already happened.
The hope that lives in Gabriel, in Mary, and in every person we meet in the scriptures of this season: Instead, hope is what comes to meet us here and now, in even the most painful present. Hope makes it possible for us to see the presence of God when it seems most difficult, to say yes to God when it seems most impossible, to sing when it seems most absurd, to dream of—and work for—a world restored when it seems most hopeless. As we move through this final week of Advent, may this hope come to meet us, to live in us, to shine through us.
Gabriel and Mary Advent 4: The Art of Blessing Door Lectionary readings for Advent 3, Year B: It matters that we hold the light for one another. It matters that we bear witness to the Light that holds us all, that we testify to this Light that shines its infinite love and mercy on us across oceans, across borders, across time. I love how John describes it in his gospel, writing of John the Baptist: He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. Isaiah sings of this power that enables him to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners.
The psalmist bears witness to this power that brings restoration and that promises us, Those who go out weeping, bearing the seed for sowing, shall come home with shouts of joy, carrying their sheaves.
Explore God's Amazing Plan for Christmas
And in the alternate reading from Luke 1—well, one can hardly find a more eloquent testimony than the words Mary sings about the God who lifts up the lowly and fills the hungry with good things. The links below, gathered up from the past decade at The Advent Door, offer a collection of reflections on the light that finds its way into the unlikeliest places—the light that brings healing and release, the light that visits us with joy when we cannot imagine it, the light that meets each hunger, the light that causes us to testify to its presence in the deepest shadows.
In this Advent week, may we bear this light for one another, and may Christ our Light go with us and illumine our way. Testify to the Light Advent 3: For those who are using the text from Luke 1 this week: Lectionary readings for Advent 2, Year B: Advent is a season that calls me to remember that even as I move across what seems like uncharted territory, there is a way that lies beneath the way that I am going.
The season of Advent is marked by roads.
Righteousness will go before him, and will make a path for his steps , the psalmist proclaims in Psalm In 2 Peter, we find counsel for how to wait while Christ makes his way to us: Therefore, beloved, while you are waiting for these things, strive to be found by him at peace. In this present time, the landscape we live in can seem utterly trackless. We may find it difficult to envision by what path Christ could enter this world, and daunting to imagine what road would finally lead to the healing and redemption of creation.
Yet this is what Advent invites us to do: In calling our eyes toward the horizon, Advent does not draw us away from the present or lull us into an avoidance of the world at hand.
- Gesetzliche Mindestlöhne aus der Sicht der Neoklassik und des Keynesianismus (German Edition).
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- The Advent Door;
- Murder on the Rocks: A Gray Whale Inn Mystery (The Gray Whale Inn Mysteries).
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- The Battle of Evermore?
Advent invites us instead to stand in the thick of this life and open our heart to the road that Christ wants to make, not only for us but also in us and through us. Because when Christ comes, the horizon he appears on is not so distant, after all. The place where he shows up is always in our very midst. The links below, gathered up from the past decade at The Advent Door, offer a collection of reflections on the road that Advent asks us to anticipate and to participate in creating.
In this Advent week, I pray Christ will give us the courage to envision, to hope for, to dream, and to make ready the road by which he comes to us. Blessing the Way A Way in the Wilderness. A Blessing for Preparing Advent 2: The Mystery of Approach Door 9: While You Are Waiting. Four years ago today, on the second day of Advent, this remarkable man died.
- Exploratory Image Databases: Content-Based Retrieval (Communications, Networking and Multimedia).
- A Jesus Christmas - Barbara Reaoch | The Good Book Company!
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- Classic Science Fiction Shorts.
I am tremendously grateful for the graces that have accompanied me in this quartet of years, and for the wondrous grace that came into my life in the form of Garrison Doles. At the time, we were a little vexed by some of the lighting challenges. This photo inspired this new poem. Let it be said you arrived like an annunciation that night, a tangle of light and song, ghost of wing promising equal parts shelter and flight.
No angel, you, but you knew about the weak points between worlds, those membranes that give way to the strange meetings it takes a strong heart to hold.