(soft music) - Welcome friends to this episode of the Everyday Educator podcast. I'm your host, Lisa Bailey, and I am excited to spend some time with you today as we encourage one another, learn together, and ponder the delights and challenges that make homeschooling the adventure of a lifetime. Whether you're just considering this homeschooling possibility or deep into the daily delight of family learning, I believe you'll enjoy thinking along with us.

But don't forget, although this online community is awesome, you'll find even closer support in a local CC community. So go to classicalconversations.com and find a community near you today. Well, listeners, I can hardly believe that it's advent. I feel like this year has been a rushing rollercoaster and I am shocked to look up and discover that this is our first week of advent.

I have a suggestion for your family, for all of our families this Christmas. What if we intentionally spent time together doing the simplest things? What if we practiced simple habits designed to draw us to one another and to start meaningful conversations and to provoke us to deeper thinking and to encourage us toward true worship?

What if, what if in this season of busy we celebrated Christmas by praying together, playing together, reading together, exploring together and serving together. This advent season, the everyday educator wants to practice these scribblers habits along with you. And we're going to talk with others who want to try this plan too.

So you can listen in every Tuesday of the advent season to ponder the next habit. And today we are going to think about praying together and I have my friend Karen Carpenter along for this ride and this conversation. Karen, thanks for joining me. - Oh, it's my pleasure. - I am excited.

Now I personally love Christmas. Are you a Christmas lover, Karen? - Absolutely. - I love Christmas and my family has always loved Christmas and we get into almost everything. We love the decorating and the baking and the caroling. We love Christmas cookies. We love Christmas parties. I like Christmas movies and we can get really busy.

My husband's a pastor. And so Christmas season is busy season at our house and has been for years and years and years. And there are years when I think it's just too much. Too much of a good thing is not too good. It's just too much. It's still too much.

And I was pondering ways for our family to enjoy the deep celebration of the season without participating in all the frenzy. And so I want us to look at how we can celebrate Christmas this year in simpler ways. And so Karen, thank you for coming on and helping me think about praying together.

I wanna ask you, I know that you homeschooled your children and you don't have any that you're currently homeschooling. You don't have any kids at home now, right? - Correct. - But I wanna ask you about this. Did your family have a regular prayer time together, apart from saying blessing at mealtime and prayers at bedtime?

Did your family have a regular prayer time otherwise? - I think that we generally use what is now called morning time. We did not have that phrase when I was homeschooling, but that was generally when we would either be reading a book together with spiritual content or we'd be reading through parts of the Bible or sometimes we'd even be using the hymnal and that would be a time when we would pray together.

- Yeah, yeah. So did you intentionally pray? I'm thinking, we did the same thing. Yeah, you and I homeschooled before the morning basket time was a thing. But we started our day together, reading scripture together, memorizing scripture together, lots of years, and like you said, reading a book or a hymn and thinking about the Lord.

But then we had a specific prayer time, and even when I was a challenge director, we tended to do this. We had a morning prayer time where I asked my children, my own children and my challenged children, who they wanted to lift to the throne together. So we had a time that we prayed for other people.

Did you guys have a season of prayer for things, people that were outside your family? - Yes, and as a challenge director, we also did that. We had, that was first thing in the morning. We would spend some time in prayer. And really, I felt like part of my job as their challenge director was to train them to think about how prayer works a little bit.

Sometimes prayer time kind of became an announcement time. I saw a rag, or this is happening or whatever. And so training them to say, okay, how would you like to pray about that? What do you want to bring to the Lord about that thing that you just told me?

To just kind of train them to think about things a little differently. - That's lovely. That's lovely, Karen, what a gift. What a gift of training. And I think, I'm sure that your students were blessed by that habit that you inculcated in them of thinking about how am I asking God to be involved in this situation or in this problem?

That's really good. Did you, in your challenge group or in your home prayer time with your own kids, did you, was it the same every day or every season? Or did you ever do anything differently during Advent? Did you have special prayers that y'all prayed during Advent? - Well, with my own kids at home, we used the Jesse tree for several years.

- Oh, yes! - And so what I wanted the prayers to be coming right out of Thanksgiving season, 'cause the season of Advent starts right on the tail of Thanksgiving. So we had just been thinking through what to be thankful for. And in general, a lot of the things that we were thankful for during the Thanksgiving season were blessings that we had received, sometimes materially, sometimes relationally.

But what we did with our Jesse tree was we would look at each of the ornaments, talk about the root that sprung from Jesse's tree and that it was for different people. It was for the Gentiles. And how can that make us thankful? And why is that so important to you and me today?

And what would be different if that weren't true? And then we would pray about how we feel so blessed as a result of each of these things, whether it's Joseph's coat or whether it's the creation of the world, which is one of them. We can get lost in, of course we're thankful for the Lord and we're thankful for the world, but what are we thankful about this world?

And when they were younger, it was very simple. It would be things like what do you look outside today and are thankful for? But as the children aged and as their spiritual understanding was bigger, some of their prayers were really meaningful to my heart when I would listen. - That's neat.

I love it that you brought up the fact that we as grownups can have our hearts softened and our gaze directed by the prayers of our children. And it's really true that each of our children is a soul. Each of our children is a soul that has been created by the Lord and they have a different perspective and they can sometimes help us to see truths that maybe our personalities are not as quick to recognize as quick to recognize.

I think that's beautiful. So if you were, 'cause we're talking about the scribblers habits of praying together, playing together, exploring together and so on. We're talking about those habits and using those habits as a way to simplify our celebration of Christmas. If you were gonna pray about celebrating Christmas, 'cause like we've got listeners who are thinking, well, that's really cool, but how would I do that?

So help us think, Karen, if you were gonna pray about celebrating Christmas, what would you pray? - I think for myself, I can get not tied up necessarily in the material aspects of Christmas, but the creating of memories of Christmas can become a very heavy load and making sure it's just like last year or exactly what my kids expected or that I thought through all the things that there's a sense in which a lot of the Christmas traditions which are so beautiful can become bondage.

And so I often pray during this time, especially now that I don't have kids at home, that I don't put too much importance on the traditions and the celebration, but instead I keep going back to the meaning for this season and that I put my importance and my efforts on things that would glorify the Lord.

And I think sometimes Pinterest does not glorify the Lord. That's where I want to head. I want it to look like a little Hallmark commercial. - That is so not restful for most of us, isn't it? - Right. I remember one year, my kids were teenagers and we were gonna go traveling and we had a Christmas tree that the kids put up and they were real grumbly.

It was just a year that we were, they did not want to travel. They wanted to stay home for Christmas, but we were going to see grandparents and we had a naked tree standing in our living room for about three days. And then I had a meltdown and just said, "We have to get the," and I made a huge, huge deal of it.

It really was not at all godly in my response to this. And I remember afterwards that they grudgingly put all the lights on and put all the ornaments on. And I remember afterwards thinking, "Wouldn't it have been better for me to make a memory "of remember the year that we had a naked Christmas tree, "but were peaceful." - Oh, wow.

- And that was, I go back to that very often in my heart and say, "You know what? "My view of what a perfect Christmas day is "or a Christmas tradition is needs to totally be bathed "in prayer and given to the Lord as a worship." And I think it would have been more worshipful to the Lord to have a naked Christmas tree that year.

- You know what? That is so, so wise. I think you're really right. We, as moms, and dads too to some extent, get so focused on creating these perfect vignette experiences for our children, thinking that's what they're gonna remember. - Absolutely. - But you know what I have discovered?

My kids sometimes do not remember the hallmark moment, the picture, because what they remember is the feeling or the stress that went into producing that moment. And they remember the oddest, to me, the oddest things because they were not, many times the stuff that my kids remember, I didn't spend any effort that I noticed on.

I did not orchestrate that at all. This moment that they remember or this event that they remember or this feeling that they remember was organic, it came from, like what you have said, when we were all happy together, when there was peace in our home, or when we just embraced some funny, semi-tragic thing, I mean tragic in my perfectionistic mind.

You know, we just embraced the silly. The year that the lights on our Christmas tree died, one strand at a time just infuriated me. But eventually we just had to laugh. And that is a memory that our family has. And really, the memory is how crazy it made Mama and then that she was able finally to laugh at it.

That's a better memory. I like your idea about praying for our attitudes and praying for our celebrations and pursuing, I guess what you're saying, Karen, is that we are pursuing the traditions or pursuing the memories for the right reasons. - Yes, because if it were my two year old's birthday that I was celebrating, I would be focused on my two year old.

And since it's Christ's birthday that I'm celebrating, I need to really work on being focused on Christ and not on my family. And that is hard. - Oh wow, I'm writing that down. - Focusing on Christ's birthday, not our family or our family moments or memories or, that is great.

And you know what, I think that's something that we're all gonna have to pray about. 'Cause that does not, first, it's sad, but that's not maybe natural. That's not the first thing. And when we live in the world where Christmas is so glitzy and jolly and loud and stuff oriented, it is difficult to keep things simple.

Well, I would love for us to read one of the most famous Christmas prayers. It's in Luke and it's commonly known as the Magnificat. It's the prayer that Mary prayed after the angel Gabriel visited her. And in Latin, it means my soul magnifies the Lord. All right, so we're gonna start in verse 26.

So it's Luke chapter one. We're gonna start in verse 26, which is before her prayer, but it kind of sets up the prayer, okay? So here we go, Luke chapter one, verse 26. And in the sixth month, the angel Gabriel was sent from God unto a city of Galilee named Nazareth to a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph of the house of David and the virgin's name was Mary.

And the angel came into her and said, "Hail, thou that art highly favored, "the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou among women." And when she saw him, she was troubled at his saying and cast in her mind what manner of salutation this should be. And the angel said unto her, "Fear not, Mary, "for thou hast found favor with God.

"And behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb "and bring forth a son and shalt call his name Jesus. "He shall be great and shall be called "the son of the highest and the Lord God "shall give unto him the throne of his father David. "And he shall reign over the house of Jacob forever "and of his kingdom there shall be no end." Then said Mary unto the angel, "How shall this be seeing I know not a man?" And the angel answered her and said unto her, "The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee "and the power of the highest shall overshadow thee.

"Therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee "shall be called the son of God. "And behold thy cousin Elizabeth, "she hath also conceived a son in her old age "and this is the sixth month with her "who was called barren. "For with God nothing shall be impossible." And Mary said, "Behold the handmaiden of the Lord, "be it unto me according to thy word." And the angel departed from her.

And Mary rose in those days and went into the hill country with haste into a city of Judah and entered into the house of Zacharias who saluted and saluted Elizabeth. And it came to pass that when Elizabeth heard the salutation of Mary, the babe leaped in her womb and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Ghost.

And she spake out in a loud voice and said, "Blessed art thou among women "and blessed is the fruit of thy womb. "And whence is this to me "that the mother of my Lord should come to me? "For lo, as soon as the voice of thy salutation "sounded in mine ears, "the babe leaped in my womb for joy.

"And blessed is she that believed "for there shall be performance of those things "which were told her from the Lord." Now here's the Magnificat starting in verse 46. And Mary said, "My soul doth magnify the Lord "and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Savior "for he hath regarded the lowest state of his handmaiden "for behold from henceforth all generations "shall call me blessed.

"For he that is mighty hath done to me great things "and holy is his name. "And his mercy is on them that fear him "from generation to generation. "He hath showed strength with his arm. "He hath scattered the proud "in the imagination of their hearts. "He hath put down the mighty from their seats "and exalted them of low degree.

"He hath filled the hungry with good things "and the rich he hath sent away empty. "He hath helped his servant Israel "in remembrance of his mercy. "And he spake to our fathers to Abraham "and to his seed forever." So that's Mary's reaction to the angel coming to tell her this most unexpected and frankly outlandish tale, okay?

So let me ask you, Karen, do you think that you would have reacted like Mary? - Don't we all wish we would have? - Yes, yes. I was hoping that you would be honest and say, well, I wish I did. I wish I would have. I can't imagine how she was able to.

- And as young as she was, we know, I think of, there's a part of me that thinks of what an amazing person Mary's mother must have been to have raised this young lady to accept God's will that is so outside her comfort zone and so amazing. And well, it's basically a miracle and she just steps into the miracle and says, glorify it, magnify the Lord with my body.

- Right, it's amazing to me. Absolutely amazing to me that she had that maturity. So you gave us a little bit, you think that she was able to react that way because of the teaching of her mother. Anything else? - I know that there was certainly a culture that so many of the young women were named Mary in anticipation of the coming of the Christ.

That was a hope that every mom hoped their daughter would be the answer to that prayer. And so I'm sure that that part of being that culture, but honestly, how can you think it was you? We all thought that was gonna happen, but not to me, a little-- - Right, and it had been so long since the prophecies that they had been hearing that for so long and waiting.

- And I have to think that in the same way that the Lord prepared Elizabeth's heart for Mary's coming with the Holy Spirit, the Lord must have prepared Mary's heart for this information because it doesn't make any sense for her to go from gathering water and food for her family and just being a young, engaged woman to sure, why not, I'll get pregnant and have the Messiah.

That doesn't make any sense. - Right, well, and in this culture, so she's not married, she's not married. And so here is an angel, a heavenly being, telling her that she's gonna have a baby. And she's like, that's not actually possible. Physically, that's not gonna happen. And then when the angel says, the Holy Spirit is gonna do this amazing thing, she just says, okay, I thank you.

I will do what you ask. - I do think that probably her time spent with Elizabeth in Zechariah was a time spent in scripture. And they are both priests and knew the word, from a priestly family, and knew the word. And so I can just imagine them pouring over what do we know about the Messiah?

Just all the verses, pulling out Isaiah and pulling out all the different times or things that they knew about the Messiah and trying to prepare Mary for what was going on. She didn't just go to hear Elizabeth's prayer. I think the Lord really sent her to Elizabeth to be steeped in what was coming for her.

- That's great, that's a really good insight. How would you describe her response to the message? I mean, she doesn't sound like she's shocked, although I would imagine she would have to be shocked. - Right, well there certainly is a big time difference between her meeting with the angel and then having this prayer.

So there was some conflation going on there. - Right, right, right, right. - And we didn't hear the rest of her conversation. Certainly some of the things she might have said to Elizabeth probably didn't sound like this. But she does resolve her heart to do what the Lord asks of her.

And I think she has to know this is gonna be a really hard journey. But I think that that's usually when we are closest to the Lord is during a really hard journey. - And I imagine that she in many ways did not know, she knew it would be hard because it was gonna start out hard.

There was gonna be stigma attached to her carrying a child before she was married. So it's gonna be hard. But I think that she probably did not know how hard it would be to watch him die when she was thinking about him being born. And I think, so often I think, Lord, thank you that you have not shown me the future before I'm prepared for it.

And so in many ways, I think that it was a blessing that she didn't know everything. I think that her response to the message was pretty amazingly accepting of whatever it was. It's kind of like the anything else clause a lot of people feel like they have with their job.

And so I'm saying yes to this. And I don't know exactly what it means or what it will look like, but I accept it. - I love the fact that after this time with Elizabeth, when she does pray this prayer, she is not meek. This is not a prayer of somebody who's like, oh, downtrodden and whatever you want.

She really is very passionate and resolute in this prayer. And she recites from generation to generation and all the good things she's seen the Lord do. And he spake to her father's Abraham. She just recites what she knows to be true of the God of the Israelites. And so she is resolute.

And I'm sure she had to go back to this prayer herself over and over again to continue to be resolute, not just in the time that she was pregnant and giving birth, but in all the years of raising Jesus. And then letting him go. - Yes. I love that.

That is so good. And that is one of the things I want for us to think about as we think about praying together as a way to celebrate Advent simply. The, her prayer shows us that she is remembering who God is and who he has been to her people throughout the ages.

And I think that prayer can do that for our family when we stop and we pray, not just for the situations or the people that leap to mind, but when we pray prayers of adoration, looking at who God is and what he's done for us, how he has acted with such faithfulness and patience and mercy in the past, I think it really softens our heart, our hearts for the celebration of Advent.

What do you think, what would you say is the main message of Mary's prayer? - I feel like it comes down to the power and goodness of God is that time and time again, God has shown his strength with his arm. He has put down the mighty, he has filled the hungry, he has helped his servant Israel, all these things he's done, not because of human people, but because of who God was.

For generation to generation, he has been faithful. I was reading a quote by Deirdre Bonhoeffer about Mary's Magnificat, and he says, "This song has none of the sweet, nostalgic, "or even playful tones of some of our Christmas carols. "It is instead a hard, strong, inexorable song "about the power of God and the powerlessness of humankind." - That is so good.

What if your family prayed prayers together as you prepared for Advent, designed to remind you, not just what the God of the Bible has done through the ages, but prayers designed for your family to look back and remember the ways that God has shown his faithfulness to you, the situations that God has brought your family through, the times when you looked for a miracle and found one, the times when you really didn't know where to turn and God answered in a way that it would never have occurred to you to pray for.

I wonder how much more full of joy our celebration of Christmas could become if we used our prayers to remember the goodness and faithfulness of God. That's really cool. I think that's the great example that we can take from Mary's response. How do you think she started to prepare herself for the birth?

I mean, do you think she got it, that this is gonna be the Messiah that people had longed for? What kind of preparations do you think she made? - I think there had to be a banked excitement in her. Because absolutely, she realized that this was an answer to the prayers of the people of Israel.

I don't think she had a clue what type of Messiah it would be, 'cause nobody did. I think they expected overthrow Rome. - Yes, they had a different picture in their mind. - Right, and so I'm sure it made it harder to believe that he was gonna be born to this poor family if he was gonna come and overthrow Rome.

That dichotomy in Mary's mind had to be there. Because they didn't see the two comings of Christ, they put them in all as one. So I think she understood that this was the answer to generations of prayers and hope of the people. But I don't think she had the crucifixion in her mind at all.

- Yes, I think you're right. I think you're right. I think she obviously began to prepare herself to have a baby, and I think she prepared herself to be what God was asking her to be. And I think she prepared by trusting God to make her and provide for her whatever she was gonna need to have or whatever she needed to become in order to accept this blessing that he bestowed on her.

- I think the seeking out of Elizabeth as a godly older woman who could speak to her certainly showed part of her preparation. And then also seeking out Elizabeth because God was doing an amazing thing in her life. And so that can strengthen your faith when you surround yourself with people who have also seen God do great things.

- That's great. Maybe that's one of the ways that we can get ready to celebrate Advent with our families, to seek out people who know God and who have seen him work and can tell us some stories and can give us some examples of the power and might and goodness and love of the Lord.

- If you think of that exploring word from the scribblers list, exploring the stories of people that we know who have walked with God is what a delight that is and how often people love to tell those stories. And it's a blessing to them to have to tell them again.

- That is great. That is great. Families, as you prepare your hearts for Advent, it might be strange to think that prayer, praying together could help you prepare for a deeper Advent season, but I think it can. And I'm suggesting that we all try that. I intend for our family to intentionally pray together, asking the Lord to deepen our preparation and deepen our celebration for this Advent season.

Karen, I have one more question for you. - I think that a lot of times, as Christians, when we become convicted that we need to prepare for Christmas in a different way, we can sometimes look down or look sideways at people who are not preparing their hearts or not celebrating in the way that we think the holidays should be celebrated and the way that we know the Lord would want us to celebrate the birth of Christ.

How can we reflect this preparation of our hearts for this season and lead others to celebrate Christmas more deeply without being preachy or holier than thou? How could we be a light in our neighborhood or to our extended family without turning people off? - Always a difficult question. I save it for the end, just for that purpose.

- I think when we are convicted of things, sometimes it is too tempting to become a zealot. And I think that one of the ways we could do it is just telling the story of how this is working for us. When I was thinking through this was an easy way to pray, one of the things I thought of is the Israelites did stones of remembrance.

- Oh, that's lovely. - And I thought, what if we got some jingle bells or something and they were our stone of remembrance. And every day when we prayed about something, we put the bells in a jar on the mantle or whatever. And that would be easy, but it would be something our kids could hold and they could get all of them out.

When we had two, we'd have two out, when we have three, we'd have three out and they'd get bigger and bigger. The noise would be noisier and noisier. And I just thought, wouldn't that be something that would be fun to share with somebody? We did this thing and this is what my four-year-old said or this is what my seven-year-old said.

And it was very meaningful to us. That's very palatable. And it's just gently telling our own story of something simple that we did. That's not even hard. It doesn't have to be crafted or look pretty or have any words on the jar or anything, just a bell jar and some jingle bells.

And what a delight that could end up being. And what we're always taught to do is to share our testimonies, so sharing our testimonies of prayer could also be a way to share this concept. - Yes, yes. Not in a preachy way, but in a, this is helping our family celebrate in a way that we've never done before and this feels good and it feels rich and it feels real.

I think that's lovely. I love that. I love the jingle bell. I may try that with my grandson. That's the sweetest thing. I love it, Karen. Thank you. That's really good. Listeners, I hope that this has given you something to think about and maybe some hope for a way that your family can celebrate the season more simply and more deeply by praying together.

Join us every Tuesday in December. We're gonna look at one of the other scribblers verbs and how that activity can draw your family into a rich yet simple celebration of this Advent season. And you know, I've been talking about scribblers, scribblers, scribblers. Some of you may know about one of our newest resources.

It's called Scribblers at Home, recipes from lifelong learners. Some of you may never have heard of this but I wanna tell you just a little bit because it might possibly make a great Christmas present for a family that you know. If you know a family that really enjoys learning together and playing together and doing things together, you could give them the gift of scribblers magic this Christmas.

Scribblers at Home recipes from lifelong learners is full of fun step-by-step activities that use art and music and history and science and math to make education a joyful pursuit for the whole family. It really encourages families to learn together through intentional play. Even if you don't belong to a classical conversations community, scribblers will bring joy to every learner in the family no matter what age.

It's not bound to an end community program. So even if you have friends or family members who don't do classical conversations or who don't even homeschool, they may find that this is a really fun way to spend time together learning as a family. Make a family's Christmas unforgettable this year with scribblers.

And if you want to learn more, visit classicalconversations.com/scribblers, all right? Karen, thank you so much for helping this first Advent podcast to touch a great chord. I appreciate you, my friend. - My pleasure. - All right, guys, we will see you next week. (gentle music) (music fades)