Advent ...

The season of preparation of our hearts for has begun and, frankly, I've felt like I'm still catching my breath from Thanksgiving! We've been out of town for the past three weekends and, that, combined with crabby Caleb's painful molars, has been a recipe for being a little overwhelmed and feeling seriously behind.

Tonight, we sat down to start our Advent devotions using the Jesse Tree Family Devotions from the RCA - going through the lineage and the story of the leadup to Christ. We had several to go through to catch up, but the boys enjoyed coloring and cutting and pasting their "ornaments" to the tree, while Tim led the devotions. There are numerous ways to do a Jesse Tree, I always imagine myself having beautiful ornaments or some sort of fancy thing, but so far we've done it very simply, by printing off the devotions and pictures and letting the boys color them and paste to a large piece of craft paper. They loved it last year, and enjoyed finding them in the Christmas bins. There were excited to start again.

A memorable moment from tonight's devotion was when we talked about Abraham and Sarah.

This was the reading

Have you ever wanted something so much that you thought you would die if you didn't get it? It's so hard to be happy when we focus on the things we don't have, instead of the things we do have.

Sarah wanted a baby more than anything, but even though she prayed a lot and tried everything she could think of, she didn't have a baby. As she got older she finally decided that God would not give her a child. But then God gave Sarah a son, and she named him Isaac. Sarah was very happy and grateful to God for giving her a wonderful son when she had given up on her dream.

The question to the boys was, "How has God answered your prayers?"

Jared's quick response brought tears to my eyes.

He told us about how he really, really wanted a baby sister. And, how God has answered his prayers and given one to our family.

Isn't that just amazing?

Lord, thank-you for answering the prayers of my children. Thank-you for building their faith in tangible ways. I love that all of my kids are answers to prayer in different ways, and sometimes answers to prayers that weren't even mine.

"All your children shall be taught by the LORD, and great shall be the peace of your children." Isaiah 54:13.