11th Day of Christmas Giveaway with Lynn Cowell

Christmas Sale: If you’d like info on getting any of my books (tax-free & with no shipping costs!) for you or as a personalized gift for someone, click here.

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Welcome to the 11th Day of Christmas Giveaway!!

Each day, December 1-12th, I am featuring a fellow Proverbs 31 sister and an aspect of Christmas. You’ll get to know her and she, in turn, will offer a fabulous giveaway! Simply leave a comment on her post to be entered in the drawing.

And, one soon-to-be-very-giddy gal who comments on all 12 posts will win the GRAND PRIZEYou may comment on all posts until Monday, December 13th at 5:00 pm EST when the winners will be announced. (to see the grand prize and get caught up on the posts click here)

Now, for our P31 sister of the day, the wonderful Lynn Cowell!

From Lynn’s Heart

Teen Mania…that describes my family! My husband, Greg and I have three teens – Zach, 19, Mariah 16 and Madi 13. When everyone is home, it is one hopping place!

The place we love to be together is in the mountains, visiting my son in college. Hiking, tubing, biking; anything as long as it combines our favorite people in our favorite place! I feel most comfortable there; in my hiking boots, well worn jeans and Appalachian State sweatshirt!

Here’s what put’s the whole experience over the top:  starting the day before the rest of the house wakes up, sitting on a porch with a cup of tea, my Bible and journal.

I love soaking in the beauty of God’s creation in the Blue Ridge Mountains. His works are His love language to me and these mountains bring tears to my eyes each and every time I am blessed enough to get there. I keep thinking I’ll get used to this extravagent beauty, but I don’t. What radical love!

Wednesdays are my favorite day of the week – I get to volunteer at Proverbs 31! Taking the requests for our devotions brought back from speaking events, I enter them into our system.It blesses me to think just how many women get to hear God’s word through our devotions.

As the “go to” girl for teens on our speaker team, I will be coordinating our RadRevolution site in January. Here girls go to find out how crazy God is about them and parents go to find content for investing in their daughters.

I also have a passion for speaking to teens through my “Revolutionary Love” conference; designed to lead teens and their moms to finding their completion in Christ!

The True Meaning of Christmas

Like me, you are probably constantly on the lookout for speaking the true meaning of Christmas in your family. Several years ago, our family was relaxing after church when my father-in-law read us an article of a robber who stole “Christmas” . The mother and four children, who were pictured in front of their home, wore their sadness.

My husband scooped up our kids and said we were going to replace this family’s Christmas. We hunted to find the perfect gifts for this dejected family. Upon wrapping them just so, we piled into the car to find the home pictured in the paper. With God as our navigator, it didn’t take long until we found a match.

Oh how I wish I could insert a picture here of the joy and surprise on that mother’s face! Giving truly is better than receiving! It is moments like these that demonstrate to our kid’s Christmas’ true meaning. Love for Jesus is more caught than taught; especially when it comes to our teens.

Lynn’s Giveaway

Do you have a teen girl on your Christmas list that you want to “catch” the truth of Jesus’ revolutionary love? My prize pack is created just for her!

You’ll receive:

~Two “Scenario” novels by Nicole Dell

~A set of six pairs of earrings from Claire’s

~ A cute little photo album

~A travel mani-pedi set

~And a copy of my CD for teens entitled “He is That Into You”.

If that teen girl is your girl, I hope you’ll stop by my blog and sign up to receive my posts each Wednesday. “In the Know” discusses current trends in teen culture as well as brings encouragement  as we seek to raise godly children.

Jesus, open our eyes to see the opportunities this Christmas season to show your love rather than tell it. Give us courage to be bold; being your hands and feet to a world that desperately needs to find your radical love!

Amen Lynn!!!

Okay sisters, to be entered to win Lynn’s great teen package, leave a comment telling about a time you witnessed the true meaning of Christmas.

Was it something you or your family did? Or was it a gesture shown to you? And yes, if you are busy today shopping or wrapping or baking, you make simply say “I’m in!”. :-)

Better-to-Give-Than-Receive Blessings,



177 Comments

  1. i witnessed the true meaning of Christmas when a friend of my husband’s blessed us with the gift of a Christmas tree — which i might add was given sacrificially as his family had little themselves. it had been a difficult year for us financially due to health issues & the loss of a job. what a blessing!

  2. I witnessed the true meaning of Christmas about a month ago. I had just picked my kids up from Kids Club at church. My oldest son talked about packing shoe boxes full of gifts for kids who had nothing. He was feeling a bit jealous, because he had to put the cutest little stuffed skunk in the box, and I could tell he wished he could have it. I told him to imagine how happy that little boy was going to be when he opened the box, and that maybe it would be his first stuffed animal ever. It was so amazing to see my little boy set aside his jealousy, and think about that nameless boy.

  3. Memorable Christmas when we had NOTHING for Christmas and not one $ for presents. Explain that, without tears, to a family of six. But God. I remember crying over not being able to buy the expensive summer sausage roll I did for meat & crackers at the holidays. How could I justify that when just buying hamburger was tough? Yet when I was cleaning up on top of cupboards in laundry room, I found THREE jewelry sets I had purchased in the past for my girls and had “hidden” and forgotten them. I found books in the basement for my older boys in their interests, that I had forgotten about. We got a basket of bread, ham & goodies from church. We got a basket of homemade knit caps & mittens on our porch. We had a $50 Walmart card stuck in our door. Kids from paper routes got extraordinarily high tips that year. Do you think God cares about what matters to us? Oh and in that box, that silent prayer of mine was answered. It had a roll of summer sausage.

  4. One year we had a lot of money trouble…just no money. Our county Sherriff’s Department heard about it and we were the recipients of a truck load of gifts for our children. I was SO overwhelmed. It was such an overwhelming thing to be on the recieving end of. We now pay it forward each year by giving to those in our community who are less fortunate.

    jenbrandes(at)frontiernet(dot)net

  5. My dad had just died and I was at a orchestra concert that was all decked out. I was really struggling to have joy thinking of all my dad was missing, and all of a sudden I felt like God was saying, “Christmas is waaay better up here with me.”

  6. One of the best Christmas memories about giving I have is from this year when our knit/crochet group from church made a lot of hats and scarves and delivered them to a local homeless shelter to be given for Christmas presents…our pastor had us bring the hats and scarves in first to church and the whole congregation prayed for each person who will get one!

  7. I am back form the 12th day post. Someone give my sister and me some Christmas cookies as my family as you know was not getting along back than.

  8. Back when I was in grade school, our school put on a beautiful Christmas pagaent always telling the true Christmas story. It always brought the true meaning of Christmas to me. I love going back in time and recalling those memories. It always get me in the true Christmas spirit. thank you for the giveaway.

    [email protected]

  9. One year my coworkers demonstrated the true meaning of Christmas to me and my unchurched husband. They saw that we were not going to be able to get our three young boys much, if anything, for Christmas because of my husband’s unemployment. They “adopted” us, and my boys were blissfully unaware of our hardship that holiday. It was quite a blessing, and I like to think that it sewed seeds in my husband’s heart. God bless you! Thank you for the fun contest and giveaways.

  10. We were new to the town we were living. We had bought a house and had sold our old house on a contract for deed. The buyer had gotten several months behind in payments, leaving us severely strapped for money. We told our kids they would each only get one small gift each that year and we would have to give them more when we got more money. Two days before Christmas, the Lions dropped off a box of gifts. When we opened the packages on Christmas, each of my children got exactly what each had wanted, the youngest a big Teddy Bear, the middle one a special kind of Barbie, and my oldest a portable CD player – there was no way the buyers or givers of the gifts could have known as we never told anyone. It made us all cry and really appreciate the way God cared about such a simple thing.

  11. The past two years have been very hard financially for us with my husband loosing his job in Dec. of 2008 and being unemployed for 5 months and then underemployed for about 9 months and now he has a great job but it is 100% commission. So needless to say, we have seen God take care of us, provide for us, pay our bills, etc. – Last year, our heat & air guy after basically giving us his labor in fixing our air that summer and our heat last winter – and then letting us take however long we needed to pay our bill, brought all 5 of our kids several Christmas presents and clothes. He told us to give them to them from us, not from him. We were able to give them something for Christmas because of his gift. He was the hands and feet of Jesus to this weary family! May we all be that to someone else!

  12. This is really a very long story but the short version is my daughter and I coordinated my office adopting a family for Christmas. I found a family through my church whose father had just walked out on the wife and four children. My office donated over $400 in cash and several other gifts, including clothes, jackets and pajamas for the kids and dishes, silverware and pots and pans for the family. I made sure mom had gifts, too! My daughter and I went shopping and then wrapped for days! Due to frugal shopping and generous friends we were able to get the family everything on their wish list! The mom was overwhelmed and cried as our office Santa delivered the gifts. (I wanted it to be anonymous so I didn’t go.) That was the start of an annual tradition for my office.

  13. I’m in! I experience the true meaning of Christmas when a little boy with Lukiemia say a song to Jesus with the words…”Is there anything I can do for you for you have done so much for me.”

  14. I’m in …. I have loved reading about all these P31 sisters! Several are now my new “goto’s for daily encouragement and I will definitely visit Lynn’s blog today to sign up!

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