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You are bidding on a BRAND NEW UNOPENED FACTORY SEALED
A Christmas Spirit:
Memories of Family, Friends, and Faith
by Joel Osteen (Hardcover)
Joel Osteen offers uplifting and inspiring true stories from family and
friends about celebrating Christian Christmas traditions.
Book Description
Publication:
For many, the Christmas season can be filled
with distractions and anxiety rather than the joy and peace it is
supposed to bring. In
The Christmas Spirit, his first holiday
book, Joel Osteen offers uplifting and inspiring stories of family and
friends celebrating Christmas traditions that will help readers return
to the essence of the holiday by practicing the principles taught by our
Savior, Jesus Christ, whose birth we celebrate that day. With these
stories, Joel reminds us all of what is truly important in life. Filled
with humorous and compelling holiday memories from Joel’s family and
friends, this heartwarming collection will inspire and amuse readers
while enhancing their faith in God’s goodness and eternal wisdom.
The stories in The Christmas Spirit reflect
that this Christian holiday is a celebration of family: God’s family,
our own, and the diverse global family. Friends and families from near
and far share faith and Christmas traditions: They laugh together. They
grieve together. They support each other. They offer proof that the best
way to overcome hurt and loneliness is to reach out to others who may
be hurting and lonely, too.
Joel’s unique stories and memories
will encourage readers to savor their own Christmas memories, to share
them with loved ones, and to create new memories and traditions that
will be passed down for generations to come. For those feeling stressed,
hurt, or lacking direction this holiday season, these heartwarming
stories will serve as a healing balm and a guiding light to a more
hopeful and peaceful holiday.
Over the past decade, Joel Osteen
has been called the Most Influential Christian in America by numerous
publications and, in 2006, was named one of Barbara Walters’s Most
Fascinating People.
Hailed as “America’s voice of hope,” Joel
Osteen is one of the most respected pastors in America. Each week 43,000
people attend his worship services at Lakewood Church in Houston, and
his weekly inspirational program is seen by more than 7 million
television viewers across America, along with tens of millions more in
200 nations throughout the world. This new book of stories from family
and friends about Christmas will be cherished by readers everywhere.
Editorial Reviews
This book is the ideal stocking stuffer for admirers of
Osteen, bestselling author and senior pastor of Lakewood Church in
Houston. In it, he recalls family memories of growing up in Texas with
his parents, siblings, and grandparents, and fondly remembers unique
holiday rituals.Whenever the Osteen clan gathers during the holidays,
they often talk about family history, something that Osteen encourages
his readers to do as well. Putting a positive spin on even dark
memories, he mentions his late father’s modest upbringing, picking
cotton as a youngster on his own father’s farm until it was lost during
the Depression. Despite the hard times, his father, Osteen emphasizes,
had a happy childhood. The lessons conveyed here are nothing earth
shattering—to do good on this earth, help families in need, offer the
gift of service to others—but his humble stories are wrapped with
Christmas warmth and goodwill. A fine addition for holiday shelves.
--June Sawyers
About the Author
Joel Osteen is the senior pastor of Lakewood Church in Houston,
Texas. Listed by several sources as America's largest and
fastest-growing congregation, Lakewood Church has approximately 45,000
adult attendees every week. Millions more watch Joel's messages as they
are broadcast on national and international television networks. Joel is
the author of numerous journals, devotionals, and books, including the
Hope for Today Bible and the bestseller,
It's Your Time. His book
Become a Better You has sold over two million copies to date, remaining on the
New York Times bestseller list for five months. Visit Joel's website at www.joelosteen.com
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
CHAPTER ONE
Our Father’s Gift
We
enjoyed the usual Christmas traditions growing up, but like most
families, we had our own unique holiday rituals. The Osteen kids, all
five of us, slept under and around the Christmas tree on the night
before Christmas, telling stories and laughing and trying to guess what
gifts we might be getting until we’d finally fall asleep. Still, we
celebrated Christmas Day a bit differently from many families. For us it
was really a big birthday party because my father and mother emphasized
the holiday’s Christian origins as the birthday of baby Jesus, God’s
perfect present to us. If ever there were a gift that keeps on giving,
it was this one.
We did exchange Christmas gifts like most
families. We laughed and carried on through huge dinners of turkey and
all the fixings. One thing we didn’t do, though, was eggnog. Instead,
real early Christmas morning while our parents were still nestled all
snug in their bed, the Osteen boys and girls climbed out of our sleeping
bags and made home brew—coffee, that is. I probably should explain to
you first off that caffeine runs in our family’s blood. We were a
coffee-drinking bunch before Starbucks ever ground its first bean. Every
one of us started drinking it at a young age because of our dad, a
pastor who started each day with a Bible in one hand and a mug of strong
coffee in the other.
Dad’s morning coffee was his little taste of
heaven on earth. Each day, he shuffled out of bed and headed to the
coffee pot first thing. Before he shaved, showered, or dressed, he had
to down at least one mug of good old Folgers “mountain grown, the
richest kind of coffee,” as the commercials said back then.
Our
father, John Osteen, didn’t just drink his morning mug of coffee; he
savored it the way my wife, Victoria, relishes Godiva chocolates. For
him the best part of waking up was definitely Folgers in a cup. He
really made a big production of his morning coffee. I’m still not sure
whether it was for his own enjoyment or for our entertainment; probably
it was both.
I would sit with my older brother, Paul, and our
sisters, Lisa, Tamara, and April, around the kitchen table each morning
and wait for our dad to join us with his steaming mug. Watching our dad
love up that very first sip of the day was a highlight of our morning,
especially his first slurp. He’d put his lips to the cup, take a long,
slow sip, and then hold the mug in the air with his eyes closed and a
smile of contentment stretched across his face.
Finally, as we sat
on the edge of our chairs waiting, Dad would take a deep breath, hold
it, and let go a sound normally heard only from Saturday-morning cartoon
characters.
Ahhhaaahaaaaaaaa!
We’d all giggle like crazy, and then each of us would take a sip of our own cups and chime in like the children’s choir:
Ahhhaaahaaaaaaaa!
Without
fail, Dad made the same deeply satisfied sound after his first sip
every morning. We laughed each and every time as if it were our first
viewing of our father’s morning ritual. Do you know, to this day every
one of John Osteen’s grown-up kids makes the same sound after our first
sips of coffee each day? Some of our own kids, members of the next
generation, also have adopted the Ahhhhhaaahaaaa! coffee habit handed down from their parents and grandfather.
This
is of course just a small part of the legacy left by my father, who
passed in 1999. You are likely aware that he founded Lakewood Church,
which he and my mother, Dodie, built up from a small congregation packed
into an old feed store. As we’ve grown older and become parents
ourselves, my brother and sisters and I notice more and more how deeply
our parents’ influence comes through in our daily lives in other ways
big and small, on holidays and every day too.
Paul was talking
recently about our dad and his coffee habit and how he would come to
breakfast each morning in his thick terry-cloth bathrobe, shuffling
along in his house slippers, hair a mess, sleepy look in his eyes. Dad
would cinch that robe’s belt sash tight and way up high on his solar
plexus, making him look like he weighed three hundred pounds even though
he was not overweight at all.
We often teased my father about how
rumpled he looked in the mornings. Paul especially enjoyed doing this,
but my brother admitted awhile back that as he was walking to breakfast
one recent morning, he caught sight of himself in a mirror.
“There
I was, in a big old robe knotted way up high on my belly, shuffling in
my house slippers and my hair a mess,” he said. “I realized I’d become
our father!”
RISING ABOVE
Another
Osteen family tradition handed down from our dad is at the heart of
this Christmas tale. First, though, I should tell you some of my
father’s history so you’ll get the full picture. Dad grew up on a farm
outside Paris, Texas, back in the horse-and-buggy days. They didn’t have
television with shows like American Idol back then, but they did
have singing contests on the town square on Saturdays, when the farmers
and their families rode into town for supplies.
My father’s
sisters thought he should enter the contest when he was all of five
years old. Before they took the buggy into town, they tried to fancy him
up to look more like an entertainer. His thick hair wouldn’t stay
combed the way they wanted, so his sister mixed in some egg whites as a
down-home hair gel to do the trick.
Unfortunately, the hot Texas
sun beat down on Dad’s egged head during the long ride into town. By the
time he made it up on stage, the rotten-egg smell in his hair was so
bad that instead of singing for the crowd, he threw up on them! Our
father told us that put an end to his dreams of being a singer, and I’m
pretty sure he stayed away from egg-white hair gel after that too.
In
his younger days, Dad worked picking cotton on the farm owned by his
father, my granddad Willis Jackson Osteen. Granddad was a successful
cotton grower until the Great Depression. Like most, his family lost
everything. They called themselves “dirt poor,” but they lost even their
land when the banks crashed and Granddad had to give up farming. He
didn’t give up on life, though.
Through his friendships with other
farmers, he was able to gather fresh produce, load it into his old
open-sided truck, and drive into Fort Worth and Dallas, where he sold
homegrown vegetables on the streets in wealthy neighborhoods. Still,
times were hard, and Dad and his two brothers and two sisters didn’t
have much, growing up. My father often talked about going to bed hungry,
having to put water on his breakfast cereal because there was no money
for milk, putting cardboard in his shoes to cover the holes in the
soles, and wearing hand-me-down clothes and pants that were too short.
BICYCLES FOR TWO
Despite
the hard times, Dad had a mostly happy childhood. His family home had
no electricity for the longest time, but they made the best of it.
They’d sit on the porch, and Granddad would play the fiddle and make up
songs. One time when my father was a boy, his sister Mary was holding
him as they listened to music by the fire. She lost her grip, and he
fell into the fire, injuring his fingers so they were scarred for the
rest of his life. Music didn’t seem to be a very healthy thing for my
father as much as he enjoyed it.
Dad often talked about the fact
that around the holidays his family was one of those to rely on charity
baskets for Thanksgiving and Christmas meals. Most of the time, he and
his brothers and sisters didn’t receive Christmas presents. I think
that’s why my father later on took so much pleasure in buying us gifts
himself. Growing up, we didn’t hear a lot about Santa Claus. In part, I
think my mother and father wanted us to stay focused on the Christian
meaning of the holiday, but it also may have been that my father wanted
to be the one to give us Christmas gifts because he received so few as a
child.
Most parents sneak around quietly and buy Christmas
presents, hide them, and then on Christmas morning tell the kids that
Santa brought them down the chimney. Our father often took each of us
Christmas shopping one at a time so we could help him pick out gifts for
our mother and the other kids. It was funny; we were like Dad’s little
helpers on those shopping trips, but he never would allow us to carry
the packages. He took so much joy in buying them that I think he just
wanted to savor the feeling of carrying them to the car and into the
house. Maybe that, or he was afraid we’d peek!
Early one December
when I was about eight years old, Dad took me and April, who is two
years younger, to look at bicycles. We didn’t buy anything, and our
father didn’t say that day even who we were shopping for; we just looked
at bikes together. A few days later, Dad pulled me aside and told me
that he’d bought April a bike. I was really excited for her, so he took
me out to the back patio where he’d hidden her new bike under a
bedsheet. I wanted to look at it, but my father told me not to lift the
sheet.
I was so thrilled for April, I went back every couple of
days just to make sure her bike was still there. I asked Dad a few times
if I could see it, but he’d say: “No, it’s a surprise. You have to wait
until Christmas.”
I couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t let me
see the bike, but I never lifted the sheet. I managed to stave off
temptation, though I did keep an eye on the back patio to make sure
April didn’t wander out there.
The night before Christmas all the
kids slept in the den around the Christmas tree as usual. When we woke
up around seven, Lisa put the coffee on so we could each have a little
sip. Then our mother and father joined us, and once we’d all had our
Christmas coffee and done the day’s Ahhhhh...
Biography
Joel Osteen is a native Texan and the Pastor of Lakewood
Church, which according to Church Growth Today is America's largest and
fastest growing church with over 38,000 attendees. On July 16, 2005
after completing $95 million dollars in renovations, Joel moved Lakewood
Church into its new 16,000 seat home -- the former Compaq Center which
is now the largest regularly-used worship center in the United States.
According to Nielsen Media Research, Joel is the most watched
inspirational figure in America. His weekly sermon is broadcast into
television markets across the U.S. where it is viewed by seven million
Americans each week and more than 20 million each month. His weekly
broadcast is also seen in almost 100 nations around the world. In 2004
his first book, Your Best Life Now was released by Time Warner debuting
at the top of the New York Times Bestsellers List and quickly rising to
#1. It remained on the New York Times Bestseller for more than 2 years
and has sold more than 4 million copies. Most recently, Joel was named
as one of Barbara Walters' "10 Most Fascinating People of 2006" and he
was selected as the "Most Influential Christian in 2006" by the readers
of Church Report Magazine. The son of John Osteen -- a highly respected
minister of the Gospel and the founder of Lakewood Church -- Joel
attended Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma where he studied
radio and television communications. In 1982, Joel returned to Houston
and founded Lakewood's television ministry where he produced John
Osteen's televised sermons for 17 years until January 1999 when his
father passed away. For many years John Osteen encouraged Joel to
preach, but he always declined preferring to work behind the scenes. In
early 1999, Joel felt compelled to accept his father's invitation and he
preached his first sermon on January 17th of that year. Little did
anyone know that would be the last Sunday of John Osteen's life. Two
weeks later Joel began preaching and later that year was installed as
the new Senior Pastor of Lakewood Church. Almost immediately, weekly
attendance began to grow at an extraordinary rate and, in 2005 Joel
moved Lakewood Church into its present location, the former Compaq
Center, a 16,000 seat arena that was once home to the Houston Rockets
professional basketball team. Now, with his wife Victoria and the
leadership staff of Lakewood, this innovative church is poised for the
new millennium. Joel's extraordinary success can be found in his core
message: That our God is a good God who desires to bless those who are
obedient and faithful to Him through Jesus Christ. It is Joel's deepest
desire that his own life be an example of that principle and that
everyone who hears this message of hope and encouragement would choose
to accept God's goodness and mercy and to become all that God wants them
to be.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Enjoying Christmas Time, January 7, 2011
This review is from: The Christmas Spirit: Memories of Family, Friends, and Faith (Hardcover)
The Christmas Spirit is a collection of Christmas time stories. Joel
Osteen shared stories and memories about his family and how they
celebrated Christmases when he was a young boy. His mother and father
always made the major decision to tell the Osteen kids about Jesus being
born for the whole wide world. Joel Osteen and his brothers and sisters
did get some Christmas presents growing up. But the Osteen children
were taught values that continued and made them who they are today.
Joel's father, John Osteen gave Joel, his brother, and his sisters a
special Christmas present to share with one another and to teach them a
virtue. Joel Osteen also gave a similar gift to his son and daughter,
because it meant so much to Joel when he received it from his father.
Joel Osteen informed his readers about Victoria's Christmas traditions.
Victoria would always travel to see her family at Christmas time. Joel
Osteen will make you think about Christmas as a time to celebrate the
birth of Jesus. He also believes in spending quality time with your
family and never taking them for granted. Joel Osteen conveys the
message of Christmas throughout The Christmas Spirit.
I liked this book because it told stories and memories about
Christmas from Joel and Victoria Osteen. I found out that we both
celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ. I think the whole world needs to
hear the message of Christ. This book is a great one to read during the
Christmas Holiday. I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys the
Christmas season! In addition, I would recommend it as a gift to give
someone else for Christmas. Joel Osteen shares his memories of Christmas
in a way that will make you want to spend quality time with your
family. His book will inspire you to make every day count and every
Christmas needs to be enjoyed because it might be someone's last.
You name it...it's in here!
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I'm selling off the extras & dupes of my personal collection.
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