Early Advent

A New Year's Resolution way back in 2008 was to pursue becoming "published" in some form other than Blogger. The closest I got that year was submitting anecdotes to Reader's Digest which, I've sadly deduced, were all rejected. After that year, I moved the goal to a list with a more attainable timeline--the Bucket List. (For the curious, I'm pretty sure it's the only thing on my Bucket List so far.)

Looks like I won't really have to wait so long. With a little generous nudging from friend and writer Dan Schmidt, I've been invited to join the ranks of several others submitting reflections to a guide for the Advent season. It'll be out and available..well..sometime around the Advent season. For those who still like feeling the texture of print on paper like my brother-in-law Wes, there will be a paperback. For those who've fallen prey to the sleek design of a Kindle like my brother-in-law Mark, there will be an e-book. Everyone wins!

If you're one of the three faithful readers around here, you may have caught on to the fact that I've been doing a fair amount of my own Advent reflecting in the past several years. And now that I think about it, that may have started around the time Dan passed on his own little informal Advent guide several years back. From then on, putting together some sort of collaborative Advent writing project in a church context has been a little dream of mine. That's on the bucket list, too, I guess. Better to let Dan do the unwieldy work of gathering, editing, prodding, refining, organizing for now.

Needless to say, I like this idea, excited to see the final product, glad to be a part of it.

I'll probably expound on this a bit more in weeks to come, but for now, you can take a peek of (or give your input on) a few of the potential covers.