Tag Archives: faith

May 8, 2013 · 12:21 pm

Stephen King and I

Like Anna and the King of Siam, Stephen King and I are really nothing alike.

He’s a man, I’m a woman. Most obvious difference.

He writes horror. I do not.

He’s a lot older than I am. Really, he is.

He’s from the East Coast, I’m a Western girl.

There’s more differences than anyone’s really interested in reading about, so I’ll tell you some fascinating things we have in common.

We both have corgis.

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Clarence & Zuzu

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Stephen King & ? (I’m not sure of this corgi’s name. Maybe Stephen will find this post and tell me.)

We both write.

Yes, I know he’s both prolific and famous. Let’s not wander into this territory.

We both consider the Twilight series rather insubstantial:

 ”The real difference is that Jo Rowling is a terrific writer and Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good,” he told an interviewer from USA Weekend. (according to The Guardian)

“Eh, I read them. Whatever,” said Alyssa Santos to this blog.

 We both enjoy long-standing monogamous relationships. Although this may sound strange, I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised to read about what a family-guy Stephen really is. His wife has been his biggest fan and cheerleader, and if anyone reading this personally knows my husband, Angelo, you will be collectively nodding when you read that he would paint his chest with my name and cheer fanatically on my behalf. He has been my very legs as I walk through this life.

We both were victims of horrible accidents caused by the carelessness of another. And, the full-scale helplessness of laying waiting for salvation, or death, to come, has shaped our ideas about living.

Stephen writes:

“A couple of years ago I found out what “you can’t take it with you” means. I found out while I way lying in a ditch at the side of a country road, covered with mud and blood and with the tibia of my right leg poking out the side of my jeans like a branch of a tree taken down in a thunder-storm. I had a MasterCard in my wallet, but when you’re lying in a ditch with broken glass in your hair, no one accepts MasterCard…We come in naked and broke. We may be dressed we we go out, but we’re all just as broke. Al the money you earn, all the stocks you buy, all the mutual funds you trade–all of that is mostly smoke and mirrors. so I want you to consider making your life one long gift to others. And why not? all you have is on loan, anyway. All that lasts is what you pass on.”

Another guy, whom I have also have a little in common with, but who also found himself crushed on a roadside, like both Stephen and I, wrote this:

The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. {Galations 2:20}

His name was Paul, of Tarsus.

It’s all on loan. Not just the money, but the whole of it. All that lasts is what you pass on.

What we pass on depends on how we view what we have. Is it even ours? Even my hurt, even my past — it’s all been a loan. How can I pass it on?

 

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April 19, 2013 · 9:01 am

Stuff of Stars {What We’re Really Made Of…}

In the picture framed by the window, I see heads bent in nature study: spider in a jar, spinning silk.  Bare feet kicking hot summer air, creating a breeze in a breathless August afternoon. They brandish digital cameras and itouches in juxtaposed irony–endeavoring to capture bugs in jars and pixels.

And I want to press palms to soft cheeks, look deep eye-to-eye and declare,

“You are filled with the stuff of stars, you are”.

It’s true. Minds capable of holding more, grasping more facts than mine, have figured it out, boiled it down to hard science. Through formulas and Einstein’s figures, theories and stellar observations of supernovas, science claims we humans are filled with the elements that swirl in the heated center of our very own sun: magnesium, calcium, carbon, oxygen, hydrogen (and more).

This somehow reasserts the Big Bang Theory that blasted elements into an airless space producing a planet, a home and a backyard friendly to life that hold the spider in the jar with his sticky-silk thread, the bees that miraculously keep our earth’s ecology intact and the brown-skinned little scientists with bent heads? This somehow bolsters the idea that these common elements mashed together over millennia into the inquisitive minds that now watch the captured creature under glass?

To me and my mind this is a conclusion unacceptable.

But that we share the same vital elements as the stars, well this is lofty stuff. That the energy contained in the minuscule walls of each atom, enough to burn dozens of earths, is safely balanced within physical, human bodies, that is baffling and awe-inspiring.

I think both scientists and mothers become silent in the wonder of it. That great blessing of life sustained.

At our very soul-centers we hold the elemental attributes of the Son.

Our cores hold the eternal, elementals of God. Created in his image, we are. We crave love, truth, knowledge, hope, relationship.

We engage in the creation and see a creative god at its center, or we don’t.

And in that moment of choice, that response that occurs in the universe of one’s private person, we each exhibit proof of that god we accept or deny. It’s in the flexing of the free will that we resemble God the most.

We freely choose. Whether or not we see the data as proof of a big bang or a big god won’t have much of an effect on the interplanetary future. One atheist remarked, “God isn’t real. Deal with it. Move on and enjoy this life. After this, it’s curtains.”

You may choose curtains, finality, fatalism. You may spin webs in a jar, as the captured and suffocating, preparing to capture imaginary prey, planning on life in an airless world.

You may not know God but you’re still filled with the stuff of stars. Your DNA is unique, your fingerprints unlike any other. The patterns of color that fleck upon your irises is yours alone. The swirling core of your soul speaks for God when your knees won’t bend and your voice won’t speak his name. He put the stuff of the sun in your body and the truth of his existence within your soul. Perhaps it’s true that your only escape from him is death. In ceasing to be alive you can flex your ultimate freedom from the idea of god.

But let me put palms to cheeks and tell you, “Jesus loves you. Your freest moment will be in opening your inner universe to his breathing spirit. No more striving, just being, living, orbiting round that beautiful free spin of a Christ-centered life. His gravity holds you, keeps you, makes your life possible. Accept it or not. You are the god of your own choosing, or not.”

What if you’re wrong? You may ask me.

What if I am? If life ends in curtains dark then I won’t notice or care, my efforts at web-spinning in the dying earthjar will matter not.

But what if I’m not wrong? What if my lines of intellectual and spiritual reasoning lead to the reality of what we cannot see here, yet?

What if? It’s a question I’ll always ask, until the word are gone from my lips and the breath leaves this body. What if?

Psalm 8

O LORD, our Lord,
​​How excellent is Your name in all the earth,
​​Who have set Your glory above the heavens!
​
​​Out of the mouth of babes and nursing infants
​​You have ordained strength,
​​Because of Your enemies,
​​That You may silence the enemy and the avenger.
​
​​When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers,
​​The moon and the stars, which You have ordained,
What is man that You are mindful of him,
​​And the son of man that You visit him?
​​For You have made him a little lower than the angels,
​​And You have crowned him with glory and honor.
​
You have made him to have dominion over the works of Your hands;
​​You have put all things under his feet,
All sheep and oxen—
​​Even the beasts of the field,
​​The birds of the air,
​​And the fish of the sea
​​That pass through the paths of the seas.
​
​​O LORD, our Lord,
​​How excellent is Your name in all the earth!

linked with Laura at Playdates at the Wellspring & L.L. Barkat for In, On and Around Mondays & Heather at The Extraordinary-Ordinary

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April 10, 2013 · 12:02 pm

Show Up, Kneel Down, Seek God {3 Things Real Friends Do}

“I wish the others could have come,” his small voice said wistfully from the backseat, “They would have liked to cheer me on.”

We were heading to Seattle for a dance competition, Nikko’s first with his all-boy hip-hop group.

Our weekend trips usually include all four kids and maybe a pet, a lot of pit-stops along the way, snacks, copious quoting from movies and at least an argument or two.

This was the most time Nikko had ever spent in a car with his parents and two full rows of seats all to himself. He might have been thrilled, but instead he was a little lonely, even for the conflict that siblings so readily provide.

I believe at the heart of Nikko’s response to the vast empty back-seat of the Honda was this: he is part of a community and community is part of him.

He has related this deep appreciation for other people who have been constantly in his life. His neighbor buddy from across the street has been his friend since diaper days. Not long ago Nikko said to me, “Mom, I can’t imagine my life without Christian. He has always been my friend.”

I love watching the appreciation and value of relationship develop in my children. It fosters a sense of belonging and interdependency. I love watching that happen in grown-ups, too.

This past week, seven men sat in my basement and prayed.

Busy men with grown-up responsibilities, families, jobs and commitments set aside everything for a few hours to meet in prayer for their friend who called for help. They bended knee, they embraced, they followed this instruction from Peter:

Humble yourselves, therefore, under God’s mighty hand that he may lift you up in due time. Cast all your anxiety upon him because he cares for you. {1 Peter 5:5-6}

Then, they came upstairs and ate the leftovers from my family dinner and by this, made my simple ham and noodle dinner a holy feast.

And I stayed in my room for the beauty of it.

Because out there, in the kitchen, in the faces of my friends and my husband I saw Christ and the hard-fought humility of his love for us. It was too much for me, so I stayed back in my room and prayed this would be, for them, a night of memorial stones. A place they could each touch back to when they feel alone and in need of community.

Because we all need to be cheered on. We all need the companionship and challenge that our friends provide.

We need the family that bears the name of Christ to show up on doorsteps and in basements and into the lives of one another. We need the linking of arms because life is a battle and the enemy is persistent and the wounds reach deep enough that without those arms linked in a chain, the legs aren’t strong enough to stand.

***

Friends,

We’ve all been blessed and let down (even hurt) by members of our communities, families, churches. Might I encourage you to press on arm in arm with the people in your community and make yourself willing to participate in these three activities of Christian love?

1. Show Up

2. Kneel Down

3. Seek God

This never fails. It may be uncomfortable, but it is undeniably effective. If you don’t have friends that Show Up, Kneel Down and Seek God together, I encourage you to ask your Father in Heaven, who gives generously (James 1) to lead you to a community of imperfect people who seek the face of our perfect God. People who will do this with you and for you are your truest friends.

Blessings,

Alyssa

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March 7, 2013 · 9:30 am

Death and a Promise {My March Garden and Predestination}

flowerpot

It is early March and the garden is a graveyard.

Stripped leafless, raspberry canes stand as skeleton sentinels over the raised beds that appear in the gray March morning as bleached-cedar crypts.

It is a deserted graveyard of  last summer’s folly and autumn’s frosted nights. Leaves lay clung to one another in a dappled, moulded pile on wet earth; and stems, once green founts of nourishment, poke the air in haphazard directions.

It all looks an architectural experiment gone awry, a verdant dystopia of what once was and what I’m left with is slime and detritus and memories.

leaf

But I breathe in chilled air laced with the scents of earthy decomposition and I breathe out again and say,

It is all death and a promise.

That is the gardener’s life: to accept the seasons and the life and loss that they bring with a trowel in hand and hope in heart.

moss

That is the life I choose. But before that, it was the life that chose me.

Before I gardened, before I carried babies in the womb and heart and arms, before I pledged lifelong love to my sweetheart, before I knew any sort of loss or living, before I came to be, the death and the promise claimed me. The story it tells and the future I hold with trembling fingers because of it is the mystery, the resolution, the revelation and the life.

In a few lines of a letter written to a church in the city of Ephesus, Paul runs a broad highlighter through the eons of time and answers mankind’s united questions: Who am I? Why am I here? Where am I going?

“Even before he made the world, God loved us and chose us in Christ to be holy and without fault in his eyes.” (Ephesians 1:4)

Even before he made the world. While darkness enveloped the solar system we call home and the breath of heaven had not yet inspired life by hovering and moving and undulating power over the darkness there was this: God loved us.

God loved us.

Before he created a twinkle or a drop or a seed.

Who? you may ask, because people are always categorizing, drawing lines in sand and making rules and structures and buildings to include and exclude.

Us.

Jesus whispered the truth to the old Pharisee: it is not the will of the Father that any man should perish.

He loved us and chose us all. Us all!

And then he made a garden.

He started the magnificent ball rolling, the seasons and the seed and the harvest. He started the miracle of microbes and  decomposition….before the fall and fruit and eyes-wide-open sinners hid behind trees and pointed blaming fingers.

Death has really been a part of the plan all along.

I believe this to be true because I know my nature, our collective nature, that prevents us from knowing the rich, luxurious gift of breath and life and work and all that comes with the experience of being human until we comprehend utter and complete loss. That is why the serpent slithered and spoke slippery-sweet words of doubt and that is why the fruit was plucked and taken and it’s juice sucked in through innocent lips. Because they were lips that knew not the abundant gift of death and subsequent life, the whole of grace.

The death holds a promise, “he chose us to be holy and without fault in his eyes.”

Set apart. Holy.

We are set apart for a purpose grand and vital, to no longer bear the marks of failure and fault and blame and regret.

Like fresh wildflowers scooped into a glass to brighten a corner, our purpose is simply to be, to please him. And I believe, and you may disagree, that this “set apart-ness” is based upon our being created in his image–we are different from every other living thing in that we are not only proof of a complex design, but we possess unique qualities and emotions that no other animal has.

God delighted in foreknowing every single one of us. That alone qualifies us with great purpose.

God knows, loves and has chosen you!

///

Friend, won’t you walk with me through the next few verses in Ephesians chapter one? Unwrap with me the simple yet magnificent mystery of God’s plan for you.

Let’s not get caught in the mire of the predestination debate, but lets shoot straight on to the real point of Ephesians 1: God thought of each and every one of us, in the immense knowledge of his divine mind, he knew our DNA, our unique features. He also knew the inevitable decisions we would each make to live outside of his plan. If it hadn’t started with Adam, it would have with one of his descendants.

We are human, made in his image, but also created to be in relationship with and dependent upon our Creator, God. He is passionate about people, all people throughout all time and circumstance on this earth. He will bring everyone under the authority of Jesus Christ. What that means exactly, we don’t really know. But we can look at the nature of God, his attributes of mercy, love, justice, holiness, faithfulness and we can trust that since God is big enough to dream up each person from the beginning of time, he will do what is best and merciful and just in the end.

Read with me the passage in Ephesians over these next few days. Let the wonderment of his perfect plan embrace you. Engage in it. Choose to see yourself and others as God does: loved, chosen, holy, purposeful, delightful.

Alyssa

Ephesians 1:3-11 (NLT)

3 All praise to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms because we are united with Christ. 4 Even before he made the world, God loved us and chose us in Christ to be holy and without fault in his eyes.

5 God decided in advance to adopt us into his own family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ. This is what he wanted to do, and it gave him great pleasure.

6 So we praise God for the glorious grace he has poured out on us who belong to his dear Son. 7 He is so rich in kindness and grace that he purchased our freedom with the blood of his Son and forgave our sins. 8 He has showered his kindness on us, along with all wisdom and understanding.

9 God has now revealed to us his mysterious plan regarding Christ, a plan to fulfill his own good pleasure. 10 And this is the plan: At the right time he will bring everything together under the authority of Christ—everything in heaven and on earth. 11 Furthermore, because we are united with Christ, we have received an inheritance from God,  for he chose us in advance, and he makes everything work out according to his plan.

linked up with Emily and at Leaving a Legacy

 

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March 4, 2013 · 10:51 am

Badass Angels and Trusting an Invisible God {The Bible Mini-series}

3107.theBibleHistory

After a quick trip to the mall to buy our kids such necessities as glow-in-the-dark socks and hip-hop competition-worthy kicks, we snuggled on the couches to watch THE BIBLE on our HDTV.

(Yeah, I am a typical American and sometimes very sickened by it, but that’s another post for another day.)

This much anticipated mini-series on the History Channel is currently being aired during the same month as Easter (coincidence? I think not).

It’s an epic movie depiction of the Word of God, that best-selling book of all time that continues to frustrate, intrigue, challenge, anger and guide millions of people all over the world.

The Bible is the source of the Judeo-Christian ethic that forced religious pilgrims into ships to cross the Atlantic in search of finding a corner of the world where they could worship God freely, sans persecution outside of the established and corrupted anglican tradition of the Church of England.

The Bible is the only document that provides a detailed account of the ministry of Jesus Christ, the person that somehow is both man and God eternal: it introduces Jesus to the worth as the only way to right relationship with the single, most powerful God and Creator of the Universe.

The Bible spans thousands of years and consists of 66 books written by 40 authors. Half of the Christian’s Bible is shared by the Hebrew people and they are at the center of most of the stories and accounts contained in it’s pages.

The Bible, and it’s main character, Jesus the promised Messiah, is the reason anyone celebrates Easter, and despite the fact that we’ve painted Easter in a palette of pastels and eggs and candy and a freaky (I’m sorry, but the Easter Bunny is as terrifying to me as clowns, but I can talk to a therapist about that, I suppose), furry jelly-bean laying rabbit, it’s central character, Jesus, and the unthinkable miracle of his resurrection still intrigues and invites and inspires wonder.

The Bible is all that and so much more.

Who got the job to write the screenplay for that?

(The above question is rhetorical, of course. If we wanted to know that, all we need to do is Google it.)

The film begins in the tumult and torrent of the the flood where Noah is simultaneously recounting the creation story to a young girl and plugging random holes in the walls of the ark. Water is everywhere and the storm is fierce.

The acting is decent, the cinematography sweeping, the drama, intense.

In fact, somewhere after the fire and brimstone from heaven destroys Sodom and Gomorrah and before we encounter a clean-cut, Egyptianized young Moses, my eight-year-old son says, “Wow, the Bible is more stressful than I realized.”

Yeah, it is. Especially in the action-packed screen version we’re watching this month.

In fact there was enough violence and bloodied-corpse close-ups to merit at least a PG-13 rating. (Not a good thing for those who present God/Jesus as a pacifist and inclusive deity that embodies tolerance for all creeds, races and sexes, etcetera.) Should your children be exposed to such violence in the Bible? Heck yeah, I say. But you can take that up with me personally. If they have to learn about beheading and incest, I’d like it to be in the framework of the Bible story, but that’s just me.

I expect this mini-series to get a lot of hype, criticism and kudos. And that’s just in our house! Throughout the Christian and secular arena, this mini-series will flash on the scene and all sorts of tweets and comment streams will debate its merits and flaws and relevance to us, here today. You know, those of us who buy glow-in-the-dark socks.

It’ll be discussed in annoying tones on this guy’s show:

newsguy

Throughout the first installment of this mini-series, my husband and I (much to the annoyance of our daughter, studying college poly-sci in the other room) continually inserted editorial comments, additional facts and characters that the film was leaving out. And of course, when Abraham had a moment in the tent with the servant, Hagar, that later produced a son, Ishmael, who later was sent into the wilderness…well, we had to explain a few things to the kiddos.

We noticed a fair amount of battle scenes that are definitely extra-biblical. Moses sword-fighting in the palace with the future Pharaoh, for one.

The most creative license was taken with the angelic investigation of Sodom. The Lord and Abraham looked down over the city in the valley near the green pastureland that Lot and his wife and family chose for themselves.

The Lord told Abraham that the city was corrupt beyond saving. Abraham interceded for the city, mostly we believe, for Lot’s sake. In this scene, if we listen to the dialog between the Lord and Abraham, we can hear the offer of grace: for ten righteous men, the Lord would spare the entire city. Here was a society marked by violence and out-of-control sexual appetite and God offered to spare the whole for the sake of a handful of righteous. Of course, there was only one, Lot, who passed the test of the angels and was spared.

Then, in true Hollywood form, the angels, disguised as a mysterious dark-skinned man and a chinese-japanese-kick-butt-martial arts Asian dude, fling off their cloaks and open a can of you know what on the sex and violence craved citizenry of the city.

Badass angels wearing something that looked like the skirt Brad Pitt wore in Troy. Holy heavenly wrath!

Brad-Pitt_03

So, yes, there is some creative license being taken here and there, and some huge omissions, such as the entire story of Isaac’s son’s Jacob and Essau. But my husband said it well:

Think of it as a conversation starter.

Yes!

I hope that all of Christendom thinks about this mini-series as a conversation starter. Because people will ask questions about the Bible and the God whose name it repeats over and again and about the men and women who “Trust in God” (this phrase is repeated numerous times by the lead characters, just so we don’t miss the theme of the Old Testament. But hooray, I say.)

They might ask questions like my children did:

Did people really come out of the ground? (that was a little Dawn of the Living Dead-ish)

That forbidden fruit looks like a plum, was it?

Why did God ask Abraham to kill and burn his own son? Did God really want him to do that?

Why didn’t the slaves have the plagues like the Egyptians?

It the angel of death real?

They may ask:

How can you believe in the Creation myth when science is proving the theory of evolution?

How can you believe in a God of violence?

What does this ancient history of a monotheistic, fanatical messed up people have to do with me, my mortgage, my marriage or my cancer diagnosis?

Ah, the beauty of conversation. Not debate, conversation.

I’m learning the beauty of this idea with my new Muslim friend, Sultan.

He is studying here at a local college through an exchange program that encourages home-stays for the purpose of helping the students learn English in the context of real conversation and culture.

Sultan is my new friend. He is muslim. He makes sweet, sweet tea in tiny cups and we talk about God and the Koran and Jesus. He has been raised since birth in his beliefs as much as I’ve been raised since birth as a Christian. We will not convert one another. We don’t even want to.

I know that’s not my job.

My job is to have the conversation, and with gentleness and respect make the source of my hope known to anyone who asks. (1Peter 3:15)

It’s the same job I have with anyone–my kids, my friends, anyone who asks.

But can they watch this hope in glorious high definition like they can watch biblical drama play out on a screen?

Oh, I want them to.

But I may not present the whole bible in authoritative, contextually correct completion just as this miniseries may not be complete and perfect in its presentation of scripture. That’s okay.

If my life displays hope in this: That I believe in Jesus, the Christ, the son of God, who came as a man, lived, died, was buried and raised on the third day, resurrected from the dead who now and forevermore reigns in the now as he did in the past and will in the future. That I believe in the Trinity of God, three persons revealed, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, who as a unified deity created all and will redeem and restore according to his perfect nature all of his creation, then I don’t have to know all the details of the Bible.

Because they have made films and documentaries on the Bible before and they will again, but it’s our lives that are being watched every day by the world, our words and actions that are being witnessed.

Are they seeing epic hope? Are they witnessing joy and triumph even in suffering?

Are we, like Abraham, living out in dramatic, cinematic faith the three words: Trust in God?

Friends,

I am counting the gifts of grace this week and linking up with Ann:

the turning of the calendar and the chirping of birds – spring

modern medicine: I was so, so sick this week and needed powerful medication to help me heal.

supportive husband: oh, what a gift he is.

my kids who cared: my youngest said, mom, I’m going to pray for you before I play my video game.

a home and bed and books to read and pillows to cradle me.

glow-in-the-dark-socks and a preteen to wear them.

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