Christmas

I love Christmas.

The lights. Shopping. Music. Cookies (I love cookies year round, but Christmas makes them even more fabulous!). Family. The crispness in the air that tickles your nose.

And I love the reminder of hope it brings.

Our world is chaotic. Crazy. Broken. The struggles and pain of suffering burdens my heart daily.

Over 2000 years ago in Bethlehem, hope arrived.

Not in splendor.

Not in grandeur.

As a baby.

A baby laid to rest in a manger, no less.

God knew.

God knew every tear that would fall from my eye.

God knew that pain every person would feel.

God knew, and God knows.

Through a tiny baby, God showed us a glimpse of hope.

Our hope isn't in what we see. It's in what we don't see, in the things yet to come.

It rests in a baby who would grow up to save us.

Hope arrived, and hope is with us still.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Magic of Reading: Incorporating the Joy of Books into the Classroom

Image
At the beginning of the school year, I try to set a few areas that I want to focus on throughout the year. Some of the goals never quite come to fruition (let’s be honest, my desk is still a hot mess, despite my lofty ambition to organize it weekly) while others are slightly more successful. One of my goals was to create a culture and love of reading in my classroom. I had the opportunity to attend the Reading Summit hosted by Scholastic last summer and hear Donalyn Miller speak (she’s the QUEEN of the reading world), and I was left to reflect on my own practice. If I teach phonics and the elements of a story but the kids despise reading, what have I really taught? Reading should be transformative. Empathy, perspective, compassion, imagination, and creativity are all nestled between the pages of a book. If we never allow kids to experience this, then we’re truly doing them a dangerous disservice. This is not to diminish or ignore the critical role of phonics, phonemic awareness, st...
Read more

Nothing Without Joy: The Role of Play, Curiosity, and Wonder in the Classroom.

Image
You only need to spend five minutes with a group of five-year-olds to realize that they are natural explorers, questioners (look up the statistics for how many questions a day a child that age asks!), and storytellers with an innate sense of wonder.  The world is big, and they are eager to find out more and make sense of it. In an article I recently read about asking beautiful questions (link at the end), it quotes Neil Postman as saying, “ Children enter school as question marks and leave schools as periods .” This is perhaps one of the saddest statements I’ve read about education in awhile. There have been countless studies conducted about the role of play, wonder, and questions in education. In spite of the research support, however, so much of education falls into the “one size” fits all trap of standardization. Although there is a shift towards critical, creative thinking, it is not complete or fully embraced yet within the structure of education as a whole or ref...
Read more

How to Heal a Broken Wing

When I was in middle school, a librarian jokingly referred to me as the one who was “clogging up the library system” because of the massive amounts of books I checked out at once. I quickly became adept in figuring out the delicate balancing act of opening doors and walking across a parking while gripping a teetering pile of books. Many of my journals from elementary school are simply filled with lists of books that I enjoyed/letters I had written to fictional characters. Not only do I drink as much coffee as the Gilmore Girls, I also read like Rory. To this day, I still feel a shiver of anticipation when I glide through the library’s revolving doors and receive a new Scholastic book order. In my classroom, we read frequently. We adore soaking in beautiful words, talking about the characters or concepts, and making connections (kindergarteners LOVE making text-to-self connections!). One of my favorite things about reading aloud is that we not only develop a love for stories an...
Read more