One December day, something more than twenty-five years ago, a young woman came into the office where I worked at a university. I was immediately smitten, and determined to ask her out. Before I got to that, I found out that she was a widow, and had two young children. So it took some time, some prodding by friends, and some very pointed discussions with God before I got up the courage to call her. After three dates, I met the kids, and we all fell in love.

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A year later, we weren't married yet, but my to-be wife said that their family always followed the Advent traditions, but that year she couldn't find any material she thought fit her kids. Would I like to write a little something for them? A story maybe?

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"Of course," I said, since storytelling had been in my blood my entire life. So I sat down to write a little story I called Jotham's Journey. Each night of Advent we'd gather in the living room. The kids usually knelt at the ottoman while I read that night's chapter. When that chapter was over, they'd always beg for more, but I kept to a strict rule of "One chapter per night!" (They didn't know it at the time, but I hadn't yet written the next night's chapter.)

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We would then sing some Christmas carols, mom would pray, then the kids would go to bed by candle light.

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That Christmas, our family was completed. While never forgetting their birth father, we became a new family, a new creation of God, and Jotham's Journey was a major part of that.

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The following month, an editor at a publishing house called me, out of the blue, and said she'd heard "through the grapevine" that I'd written an Advent story, and asked to see it. A couple months after that they asked to publish it, and Jotham's Journey -- and all the books that followed -- touched many more families.

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We were all married the June after that Christmas, my wife, two kids, and I, and my wife and I now have five grandchildren. Each Advent, we still read these stories together.

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Yes, Advent is about preparing ourselves to celebrate the truth of the Christmas story, and the gift of the Messiah at the center of that truth. But for me, Advent means a moment in time when God also prepared me for another gift, the gift of a wife, of children, of a family.

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