Friday, December 2, 2011

ADVENT WITH CHILDREN by Candice Duffy

December 1st
Day 1-Jesus: The Light of the World!


Today is the first day on our journey through the Christmas story and let me admit right off...it was rough! I think I'm gonna start including in my prayer each day, "Please God, just get me through it with my sanity still intact." Hopefully, those of you with multiple children (or children at all) understand and find my comment funny :) I had a picture in mind of how this would go and well....let's just say it wasn't smooth sailing! But with that being said, my children did learn today that Jesus was sent to earth to be light in a dark world. Baby steps....


First, we were happy to come home and find Daddy home early! He got to read our Bible passage before doing a conference call for work. We read Isaiah 9:2-7 before taking turns working on our ornament. We talked about how we feel when we are in complete darkness. We also talked about how sin, fear, selfishness, and anger are dark things in each of our hearts. The solution to making our dark world a bright place was Jesus: the Light of the World! As you can imagine, my 3 year old went off on rabbit trails about camping in the dark and making "spooky scary faces" in the dark, but hey, he definitely understands what darkness is.



Next we took turns making our ornament. This was the tricky part. We are making one ornament. I have four children who absolutely will get practice exercising the meaning of "waiting your turn"...for the next 23 days :) There was crying (mostly by my youngest), screaming (again-the youngest) ....quite possibly even gnashing of teeth (that would be me) - ha!






In the end, though, we made a candle. Noah hung it up today on our garland, and we are reminded each time we pass by it that Jesus was sent to earth to be light in our dark world. Thank you, God, for sending us your light!



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