Advent - agious

There's nothing to bring home the ascetic nature of Advent like watching a three-year-old struggle to comprehend - for yet another day - that she still cannot have her Christmas presents!  This season has been an entirely new and unique experience for us:  I finished classes on December 14, turned in all my papers by the 16th, and was summarily left with nothing on the agenda.  After my family came and left, this may be the first real "break week" I've had for as long as I can remember - there's been so much discernment going on, so much planning around this or that travel.  We're finally here, we're not going anywhere, and it's kind of... nice.

My parents, sister, and nephew came and visited last week, and we had great fun showing them around Austin and watching the cousins wreak havoc wherever they went.  We look forward now to settling into a long family celebration of Christmas.  Today we (belatedly) celebrated the winter solstice by eating dinner and getting ready for bed all by candle light.  The kids were, to put it mildly, excited - we had quite the time getting them to sleep!

Now that I've finished all my papers, I want to share a few, so I'll load a few into this blog for those of you who are interested.  My favorites are a sermon I had to write based on a passage from Dietrich Bonhoeffer's The Cost of Discipleship, my final paper for Greek (not as tedious as it may sound), and my final paper for my Bible class.  Feel free to read them at your leisure - they are somewhat longer than blog posts.