Our Advent List

We Barons have created our fair share of "Dear Santa" letters. Each November the kids get "The Big Toys R Us Magazine" in the mail and spend weeks flipping through the pages, circling all the toys that look appealing to them. I've created Amazon wish lists with everything from books to boots. Josh has listed titles, authors and item numbers on scrap paper for me to order the specific books and commentaries he hopes to open on Christmas morning. This year was no different. The pages of the Toys R Us magazine are covered in ink, my wish lists have been emailed to Nana, and Josh is dreaming of the books that will soon grace his new book shelves.

But on Sunday, in Josh's sermon he mentioned an article he'd read about creating an Advent List. This list differs from a Christmas list in one significant way. Rather than hoping to receive each and every item listed, The Advent list consists of things we hope God will take away during this Advent season, in order to make room for the Christ child to grow inside of us. As dreadful as that sounds, we decided to give it a try on Sunday afternoon while eating lunch.

Solomon offered up the first suggestion for our list. "I want God to take away my bad dream of a scary monster with glowing eyes."  As he started to further understand the concept of what we were doing he went on to say that he wanted Jesus to take away his temper and help him not run off to his room, angry, so often.

At the young age of 4, Lydia did not achieve that level of understanding. She quickly chimed in with many silly ideas of what God could take away, such as "my teeth". As we offered these suggestions to her,  back-talking and her quick temper, she got mad, and the exercise began to turn sour. So we laughed at her silly ideas and moved on to Josh and I.

Josh wrote down his request next. He asked that God would take away his desire to be online, checking his many different sites so often. He mentioned that he feels like he wastes too much time in a day checking and re-checking sites such as CBS Sports, Fantasy Football, Twitter, Facebook, email, etc. 

It was my turn to contribute next. Immediately my moodiness came to mind and I said that I wanted God to take away my grumpy moods. Solomon was quick to say, emphatically "Me too!", only to make me realize that I needed God to take this away from me even more. 

I really wasn't very excited about making this Advent list when Josh suggested it. But the completion of this list has caused me to pause and think about the way that I pray, and the way that I live. So often I find myself asking for healing for a sick friend, reconciliation for a broken relationship, encouragement where there is doubt or insecurity -- all very good requests. But, I haven't spent enough time with God, evaluating the parts of myself that need to be taken away. What other areas of my life need to be simplified, stripped, made bare? What will God teach me during this Advent season?

On a much lighter note, there was one thing that would have been on my Amazon Wish List, but I wanted it so badly that I decided to buy it for myself. And today, my first "Joy of Cooking" cookbook arrived in my PO Box. And I am so excited to get the pages of this cookbook messy with olive oil, flour, pie crust, and cocoa. So, needless to say, I am crossing my fingers that God will not take away my love for cooking good food!