Ornaments with A Cause

A young boy decides to make Christmas ornaments and the proceeds go to help a homeless/poverty mission organization. Awesome. Below is a little info on the family and then below that, there are two links. The first link is a link to the ornaments for sale and the second one will be a link to the mission it is supporting:

Greetings from the Carlson family. Eric, Kristy, Brandon & Aidan live in Omaha, Nebraska. Brandon is in 3rd grade at Ezra Millard Elementary and Aidan attends preschool at Hamilton Heights Child Development Center.

Our family likes to participate in a service project each year during the holiday season. We started making Lego ornaments for our extended family and thought they were so unique it would be a good idea to sell them to raise money for charity. Each member has a job (or two) in order to make and sell Lego ornaments. Brandon is the manager, spokesman, and master builder. He also tracks inventory, orders, and profits. This year his class is helping by sponsoring a drive to collect items needed for the Hope Totes.

Kristy is responsible for product development, ordering, and super glue administration. Eric runs the shipping department and motivates the master builder. Last but certainly not least is Aidan (age 4) who is able to help for the first time. He sorts colors in different containers and can build the big presents--but only after he creates a unique structure of his own.

This year the proceeds will be used to purchase items for Kid-Friendly Hope Totes full of shampoo, toothbrushes, tooth paste, and other personal items kids need to stay healthy. Typically the only items available are adult-size. We believe these children should have access to products made specifically to suit their needs!

Ornaments For Charity
Ministry It Helps

Christmas Eve & Christmas

On Christmas eve, we had a few families over after the service. It was great to see so many kids jammed in the house and to hear the conversations going on with the parents. we had a small crowd (including us) of 14 kids and 9 adults. Pictures are below:














On Christmas day, we woke up, the kids open their gifts from us and then we did our advent reading and had breakfast. After breakfast, we watched the Christmas Story, set up the snack table and did nothing but veg for hours. My in-laws are here, so we then had time for present opening from them. Here are a few photos:

Christmas 2009 Photo

We attempted to get some pictures of the kids during the Christmas season. We were going to use them to pass out, maybe make cards, a calendar of at least to blow up and put in frames for the wall ---- my office.

We took some on the couch and then had them lay on the ground. We had them attempt to be serious and then to have fun, here are some of the pictures:

A Christmas Photo

Here is a photo of the kids during the Christmas season. This is a picture of them at church on Sunday in Room 100 infront of the trees:

Christmas Eve Sermon: Remember When ...

Tonight we have left our homes and celebrations of a holiday to ensure that we are also participating in a holy event. Even if just for an hour, we have set aside the excitement and hustle of shopping and traveling, the arrival of family and friends, the extraordinary meals and the beautifully decorated homes in order to take a journey back to Bethlehem. There we join Christians from all over the earth that are doing the exact same thing this evening – worshipping the Christ Child, our newborn Savior

When families and friends get together, it is not long before someone starts to tell stories. Many of you have recently been reunited with family. That means that either to your horror or to your joy, you will soon hear the phrase “Remember when….” Others are spending Christmas away from people that they love, and the yearning for them will also make them remember stories from their past. Whether you tell these stories to others or only to yourself, it is impossible to get through Christmas Eve without a story or two. We need these stories. In a world that tries to pull us in so many conflicting directions, these stories serve as a link to our past and to our identities. They root us in the relationships, joy, and even the pain that have created our lives.

Now we gather in church as a family of faith to remember the most important story of all. Remember when .. he was born to us?” It happened thousands of years ago and in a place thousands of miles away, but it is a story we cannot forget. In a moment, we can return to the donkey in the stall and the smell of hay. A couple from out of town is exhausted and staying in a barn because they cannot find any other place to stay. The woman gives birth to her son that night, wraps him in cloth, and lays him in a manger. Soon shepherds arrive and tell an amazing story about the heavens opening up in song.

It is a story that we tell carefully to our children so they will remember every detail as if they were there when it happened and as if this is a story about them, which, of course, it is.

I remember hearing Martin Luther’s reflections on Christmas, le me share it with you
Martin Luther, reflecting on Christmas, noted how often God shows up, but not where you and I have been looking. We had sought God in the heavens, and instead God is born in an occasionally annoying, crying baby. We had thought our redemption would look more like escape from all this, and instead he joins us here. We were all looking in the wrong direction. The birth of the Christ Child reveals, among many other things, that our Christmas idealism is thin-lipped and ultimately trivial.”

Wherever tonight finds you: that is where God embraces you by taking on the flesh of Jesus, Immanuel, God with us. It is that good news we announce, celebrate, and hope in this night. Like the surprised shepherds and Jesus’ parents, all Israel, welcomed this embrace.


Our Gospel Lesson tonight was from Luke 2

In one of the bibles that I was flipping through in preparing this message, I saw the following title: A Big God for a Little People—Luke 2:1–5

Our mouse in the children story thought he was insignificant, but he was not. Our lives are very similar. We, at times, believe that we are insignificant (little) …. But we are not.

Have you ever thought what an amazing thing it is that God ordained beforehand that the Messiah be born in Bethlehem (as the prophecy in Micah 5 shows); and that he so ordained things that when the time came, the Messiah's mother and legal father were living in Nazareth; and that in order to fulfill his word and bring two little people to Bethlehem that first Christmas, God put it in the heart of Caesar Augustus that all the Roman world should be enrolled each in his own town?

Have you ever felt, like me, little and insignificant in a world of six billion people, where all the news is of big political and economic and social movements and of outstanding people with lots of power and prestige? If you have, don't let that make you disheartened or unhappy. For it is implicit in Scripture that all the mammoth political forces and all the giant industrial complexes, without their even knowing it, are being guided by God, not for their own sake but for the sake of God's little people—the little Mary and the little Joseph who have to be got from Nazareth to Bethlehem. It is not our prosperity but our holiness that he seeks with all his heart. He is a big God for little people, and we have great cause to rejoice. We, the children, may be conformed to the image of his Son, Jesus Christ.
Please remember that Christmas is about what God has done, not what we have done. Christmas is about God’s attitude toward mankind and his dealing compassionately with us and not as our sins deserve. Christmas is about God changing His plans for our future.

Remember also that Christmas is a powerful symbol of birth. Each year at this time as we celebrate the birth of Jesus over two thousand years ago, we are called to be as vulnerable as a child and to open up to the possibility of new birth within ourselves. God sent his Son to lead us into new life and to help him turn darkness into light. That’s what Christmas is about.
The twelve gifts of birth are what we need to cooperate with Christ in the process of
transformation – of ourselves and the world. Christmas is a time to remember our birth, our heritage and the gifts that God intended us to claim and incorporate into our lives.

And so I quote to you from The Twelve Gifts of Birth.

At the wondrous moment you were born, as you took your first breath, a great celebration was held in the heavens and twelve magnificent gifts were granted to you:


The first is Strength. May you remember to call upon it whenever you need it.

The second gift is Beauty. May your deeds reflect its depth.

The third gift is Courage. May you speak and act with confidence and use
courage to follow your path (I think God would add: the path I have dreamed for
you.)

The fourth gift is Compassion. May you be gentle with yourself and others. May
you forgive those who hurt you and yourself when you make mistakes.

The fifth gift is Hope. Through each passage and season, may you trust the
goodness of life.

The sixth gift is Joy. May it keep your heart open and filled with light.

The seventh gift is Talent. May you discover your own special abilities and
contribute them to a better world.

The eighth gift is Imagination. May it nourish your visions and dreams.

The ninth gift is Reverence. May you appreciate the wonder that you are and the
miracle of all Creation.

The tenth gift is Wisdom. Guiding your way, wisdom will lead you through
knowledge to understanding. May you hear its soft voice.

The eleventh gift is Love. It will grow each time you give it away.

The twelfth gift is Faith. May you believe.

I don’t know what you will find under your Christmas tree tomorrow morning. But you came here, tonight, I assume to find something special that can’t be wrapped in a box and placed under a tree. What this night will offer as darkness turns to dawn is a gift from God – a baby born for us. A baby who will grow into a teacher and a savior. One to whom we can turn to for help as we try to live into the gifts of our Divine Father.

Morning will break. It will be a new day after a long night of birthing. Rejoice! And may you kneel in wonder and adoration at the gift God offers the world – feeling in your hearts the stirring of new life and a renewed hope for a better world. So leave this evening – remembering and cherishing the gifts you received at your birth. Strength, beauty, courage, compassion, hope, joy, talent, imagination, reverence, wisdom, love and faith. If you believe that you have lost any of the gifts along the way in your life, reclaim them tonight. Carry them home with you. You don’t need a big Santa sack, just an open and receptive heart. And then, get ready for new and abundant life. AMEN.

Advent Waiting

Advent Waiting
By Peter Marty

It’s not just about us. This season let’s come to God.

We lay some pretty heavy burdens on God’s shoulders. We place some fairly serious expectations in God’s lap. On one level, there is nothing wrong with our regular pleading for the Lord of heaven and earth to come through for us. On another level, though, there are problems with this lopsided practice of faith. Why should the weight of responsibility for sustaining a two-way relationship always fall to God?

Take our prayer instincts, for example. The prayers in many congregations commonly conclude with the petition: “Lord, hear our prayer.” It’s as if the burden for listening is on God hearing us rather than on us hearing God. Our ears are evidently exempt when it comes to many prayers. We trot out a list of concerns and hope God will click into gear and show some responsiveness to our requests.

Would that we could learn more from our Jewish counterparts whose focus is more on hearing from God than speaking to God. Our Christian habit of eagerly announcing what we believe or what we want from God is a far cry from the central pronouncement of the Jewish community: “Hear, O Israel.” Their listening approach to faith would do well alongside our many spoken claims, propositions and “I believe” statements.

Or consider the patient and not-so-patient waiting of many believers who want God to reveal a personal plan for their life. The assumption is that God knows who our mate for life should be, what our next career move ought to be and what our odds for succeeding in that brand-new diet plan will be.

God knows the answer to such specifics, many people profess: It’s just that God refuses to reveal that answer to us on the schedule we desire. Never mind that Scripture gives no evidence for this “personal plan” talk, in spite of God having a will about some very large and important things.

It must simply feel good, and sound trusting, to make God responsible for coming up with a personal design for our individual lives.

Our relationship with God

Here’s my proposal for this Advent and Christmas season: Let’s rethink these behavioral tendencies. How about a fresh willingness on our part to actually share in a relationship with the Lord? This would require some different habits than those that typically expect God to make a command performance and rise to meet our needs. We would carry more of our load in sustaining the quality of relationship God desires.

Think of the many times in life when you’ve wondered why God hasn’t been in precisely the place where you most needed God to be. Generally, this declaration of divine absence happens when we are in deep crisis. We may spend precious little energy inquiring as to the whereabouts of God when life is humming smoothly. But when things go awry, the Lord often catches the most heat.

It doesn’t have to be this way. In fact, faith shouldn’t be this way. Why is it that we don’t ask more questions about our absence from God than of God’s absence from us? Given our conspicuous absenteeism from the Lord on many days, this shift in thinking would be refreshing. It would serve as a nice reversal to the troubling practice of often ignoring God, only to expect God to be suddenly at our beck and call.

In the congregation I serve, we use a Taize chant during many Advent services: “Wait for the Lord, whose day is near. Wait for the Lord, be strong, take heart.” This is all well-and-good theology. It matches one strain of Scripture. We must be patient in waiting upon the Lord.

But there is another strain that deserves attention as well. This one has God waiting patiently for us—perhaps waiting for us to finally “get it right.” Here we discover God putting up with all sorts of loose ends, every imaginable form of hard-heartedness and one wrong stacked upon another.

The author of 2 Peter wrote: “The Lord is not slow about his promise, as some think of slowness, but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance” (3:9). This faith statement is emblematic of a Lord whose compassion will not foreclose on the future. It’s divine patience at its best—the Lord waiting upon us with grace and mercy.

In an old Jewish parable, a young man is troubled by the delay of the Messiah. He goes to his rabbi and asks: “Why does the Messiah not come? It may have been that in former times the Jews were not ready. But we have now endured the Holocaust and have never been so ready.”

The wise rabbi drops his voice to a low whisper: “I will tell you a great secret,” he says. “It is not we who are waiting for the Messiah. It is the Messiah who is waiting for us. He has been here all the time. We just haven’t found ourselves to be ready for him.”

I like this parable as a reminder that God waits for us—a startling reversal of the way we usually think about our tendency to wait for God.

Part of our Advent commitment ought to be a restoration of surprise to our faith lives. Such a move would free us from the monotony of always expecting God to meet our timetables and answer our every call. It’s time we quit abandoning astonishment, taming the truth and angling for predictable surprises. Like the student who shows up the first day of class to ask his professor, “Tell me exactly what I need to do to get an ‘A’ ” or like the wife who picks her own Christmas presents so her husband may then wrap them, we void life of surprise far too often.

When we remove surprise from faith, we are left with nothing but dead religion.

When was the last time you thanked God for not showing you the future? Maybe it’s time to reverse all that waiting for the Lord to deliver the goods for which you long. Stop waiting for a plan to arrive on your doorstep.

Think instead of the Lord waiting for you: “Surprise me,” the Holy One says. “Tell me what you plan to do with this precious new day I have given you. With great eagerness, I await your next move.”

Christmas Morning

The kidios always walk into the living room together on Christmas morning. In this manner, they can all see their presents at the same time. Their reactions at time are quite often a little different. This year, Bethany was the one with a little different reaction. For your information, the present from "Santa" is always unwrapped and their presents from us surrounds their present from Santa. They are allowed to ask "Santa" for 1 present. This year, "Santa" brought all 3 of them their wish.

Here is the video of them on Christmas morning: