Monday, December 22, 2008

Advent... Day 22

More. Snow.

Found out yesterday that my sister asked Wyatt (a few weeks back) what he would like for Christmas.

"Well, you can't get this for me, but two weeks of sledding."

He's about to get his wish.

(Little rat! Why didn't he wish for a long family trip to Hawaii?!)



Tate has a plan for opening the remaining books. He has a favorite that he knows is still in there, and he gets to open the last book on Christmas Eve, so he's lobbying his brothers to open the other two. Gunnar was happy to cooperate tonight and got a bonus - I wrapped two books together. "Snowmen at Night" and "Snowmen at Christmas" are fun picture books about the secret adventures of snowmen, while their creators sleep. Apparently they're a lot busier than you thought. Interestingly, the Christmas one mentions them celebrating the birth of a King.

Our devotion tonight was a sad one, remembering Herod's slaughter of the boys of Bethlehem. Very hard for Gunnar's tender little heart.

When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi. Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled:

"A voice is heard in Ramah,

weeping and great mourning,
Rachel weeping for her children
and refusing to be comforted,
because they are no more."

3 comments:

leah said...

The slaughter of the innocents- it literally makes my heart shrink up in horror. I can't imagine those times, and am thankful my babes are safe from tyrants!

Herding Grasshoppers said...

Me too!

We read things like this in the Bible, and - maybe because it's so long ago, or we've read them so much - we kind of skim over it.

I remember seeing the DreamWorks animated "Prince of Egypt" (the story of Moses) for the first time when one of mine was a baby. For the first time I felt the horror of it. (Pharaoh's soldiers killing the boys, and throwing them into the Nile.)

leah said...

I actually thought of the same scene from Prince of Egypt. Being born as a boy was a dangerous thing in those days!