Tag Archives: love

February 15, 2013 · 3:09 pm

Let Them Eat Love {a communion of grace}

IMG_4321I  sift flour into a bowl.

With my hands I mix the butter until it disappears into the flour silk-smooth.

I pat and push the mixture and press the heart cutter deep into the soft layers of dough.

I make heart biscuits for the beloved souls that gather around my table. Heart shaped food.  A silly demonstration of the pulse of my heart: how can I convince them how much I love them?

So I feed them love. I feed them heart-shaped cookies and dough and meatloaf, even. I want them to taste it, savor it, digest the love in it not just the fun or the flavors of a holiday.

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This is my offering. This is my communion table.

Do you know? I ask, do you know how deeply loved you are? 

I write lists. 

Lists of reasons they are special. Amazing. Funny things, dear things, memories that we share. A list for each one, written in pink permanent ink in my own hand – not typed or purchased or computer generated. My thoughts, my love, my handwriting. And the lists, love-lists on strips of paper fill burlap hearts.

I stitch hearts of rough burlap and cotton thread.

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Needle in hand, simple stitches in the familiar shape – a dotted line of love. And the truth of their loveliness, tucked inside and stitched and buttoned up is a gift of intention. In order to reveal the lists, the love lists I’ve made for each one of them, they must break open the heart and take the truth out with their own hands, read aloud and hear and speak the truths:

You’re my firstborn.

You make me feel loved.

You are creative, full of possibility.

You use your gifts to make others happy.

You always help.

The naming continues. There are more reasons than there is room in the hearts. Stuffing all that beauty and truth into small hearts is too miniature a message of the love that spills from my eyes even as I write and stitch and stuff and button.

They are symbols, all.

The love feast and the hearts stitched and broken, the food and memories shared. They are quiet, constructed, sculpted symbols and I, an artist wresting truth from lifeless stone, desperate to draw out the value of the people I live with. I can’t say the whole of all I feel, all I believe and know about them–I fear the words would hurt as they came out of me. I am too small to hold it all, too inept to phrase it all. So I set out the symbols on the table, the bread, the drink, the sweets shaped of hearts and sprinkled with sugar, and I pray in my always breaking heart, breaking from fulness:

Let them eat love. Your love, Jesus. Let them be filled and rounded and satisfied. Let them look into my eyes, each other’s eyes and see Your face, Your love, Your feast of grace ever before them. Make these symbols a holy feast, a sacred joy, a gift.

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Linked up with Lisa Jo and with Emily and Laura

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March 27, 2012 · 10:26 am

Thoughts Before Dying

I do remember details in stunning clarity.

The gentle cool of the night air, a handful of stars on black satin sky. The cold, dull outer edge of the scissors as they moved up my leg and down the other. My clothes falling away. Vulnerable, helpless me left behind on a pallet.

Breathe.

I recall the shape and scent of the sterile plastic mask. I’d been given the responsibility to keep it near my nose and mouth.

Breathe.

But my arm kept reaching out to my savior, the man with the scissors, the one who asked me how to spell my name, the one who finally told me, “We’re going to do the breathing for you.”

And a woman, appeared at my left. Strong and reassuring she leant me the strength to ask the question she knew was coming, the question I never thought about asking before, “Am I going to die?”

Breathe.

I thought she was pretty. Had I a savior to my right and an angel on my left? Is this how it goes, then?

Breathe.

And no bright light at the apex of my vision, no strains of music.

Breathe.

Just the love. That’s really all there was in the focus of my mind. No lifetime memories flashing, no last-second regrets, no manifestation of flowing robes and shimmering gates.

Breathe.

Just the love.

The weight was crushing and the air, beautiful and summery and light as whispers, flowed and rippled around me but with all my strength I could not, could not draw it to me. And my mind and my heart and everything I had embraced those I love: my children, my husband, my everyone.

I knew so much and so little at that moment. But it came down to one truth:

I love as long as I breathe, and I keep trying to breathe so that I can continue to love.

Breathe….but not fear. It wasn’t fear my soul pushed away.

Hands working over me. Busy, saving, working, knowledgable, expert. Comfort. I felt comfort by the saving efforts, strength by my companions, hope in the tiny gulps of air. And certainty of  the truth of a good Creator.

He didn’t watch from a parapet on high, but served in the hands of my saviors. He responded to our concert of crying out: help! For six Santos’ looked beyond crushed metal and broken glass, hearts reaching through the fear and we knew God heard us.

This rest, this comfort, this electric place between panic and fear and truth and faith, this tiny square where the soul can stand in fortified confidence. This is the stake that drives faith into the heart’s hard ground and holds the flag that waves in the winds of life’s storms and flaps and snaps and says one, bold, relentless word: Love.

photo credit rgbstock

Friends,

I’ve been considering the last prayers of Jesus before he crossed the Kidron Valley, before he entered the quiet olive grove to wait for Judas to appear with the captors who would lead him to certain death.

We know the mystery that he prayed with such determined fervor and intensity that blood droplets formed and gathered and ran down his brow and sprinkled his beard.

We know he was with his closest friends and followers but they lacked the deeper understanding of this dark night and continued to fall asleep, leaving Jesus alone with his future.

We know that the Son of God, very God himself, asked for another way if there was one. But no bright light appeared to light a new path.

The hope of the cross was all he had left. And the strength gathered in the emptying would move his sandaled feet across the Kidron to his betrayer.

But look here: in the thin leaves of John 17.

“I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: I in them and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world. Righteous Father, through the world does not know you, I know you, and they know that you have sent me. I have made you known to them and will continue to make you known in order that the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them.”(vs 20-26)

He was thinking about us — you and me.

In his final moments he knew it came down to us.

When he looked past the dark horizon of his imminent death, he saw us: those who believe in him through the message of the Bible. He was overcome with love and concern and although he knew full well that there would be glory for him, he desired to share it with us, to bring us into this perfect rest and comfort and love.

He loves you that much, he really does. Don’t deny yourself the opportunity to know God, to understand in you spirit the fullness of this belonging, this love and completion. Whatever has stood in your way before, shrinks in the long and loving shadow of that cross.

Remember, in his final breaths of prayer, Jesus prayed for you.

Alyssa

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February 8, 2012 · 12:23 pm

Eight Easy Prayers {That just might change everything}

ImageIt’s a wonderful thing to devote time to prayer, you know, the kind of prayer that drops me to my knees in a  face-to-the-floor session that changes me.

But today I’m going to try to pray these eight little prayers.

They are simple, short and maybe if we all tried this in one single day, perhaps the most effective prayer experiment ever:

Forgive me.

Help me to forgive.

Thank you.

Help me to thank you more.

Show me ways to share Jesus.

Make me a blessing to someone today.

Give me love.

Show me ways to give that love away.

That’s all for today. Just those simple all-in-one-breath prayers, all day.

{Feel free to print and put on your mirror, dashboard, wherever and join me!}

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August 12, 2011 · 9:07 am

Redeemed Beauty {thoughts on Loveliness}

When I first saw her, I was smitten. Completely.

She was, even as an infant, Lord Byron’s mysterious heroine:

She walks in beauty, like the night

Of cloudless climes and starry skies,

And all that’s best of dark and bright

Meets in her aspect and her eyes;


And I shook my head (still do) at the funny fact that this Norwegian actually gave birth to something as dark-eyed and brown as she. I have four, kids (half Filipino) often complimented for their good looks. And then the following comment follows: They don’t look anything like you! Do people ask if they’re adopted?

Thank you, I know there is no resemblance and Yes, I’m asked that often.

But I’m okay with it.

I think every mother drinks in the miracle beauty of her children. We don the love goggles before we cradle their new, warm bodies in trembling arms.

To us, they were beauties in the silent stages of the womb. Hands on bellies, we marveled at their development, prayed, asked for protection for this life that was our responsibility, yet wasn’t.

Pregnancy is a curious love affair. A mother is the life-bearer but not the life-giver. We learn the tandem rhythm in those forty weeks. The wilderness womb is the clutch of humanity, the cradle of life. And in it’s mystery and miracle lay beauty tremendous in all it’s frightening, fascinating and fulfilling aspects.

When our first pregnancy ended in miscarriage, my soul was ripped and angry and confused. As I mourned a life I never knew, I came to terms with the tenuous vapor of life and began to understand the intense love God has for his children: He loves because of the immediate miracle of life and because of the redeemed possibilities.

My children are most beautiful when they are repentant, when redemption flutters in the wings of their spirits, after we battle through difficult seasons and attitudes, stiff necked and anger-fired, and come to a place of repentance and reconciliation. The moment is so perfect, so good, that the freshly polished character in them glows into golden splashes of hope. And I am transported to those tremulous moments when the baby kicked or rolled a fist against the inside of me and all I saw was hope – and it was beautiful.

He has birthed us through the ages, swelling with life, He gives and gives and gives. Just as a mom loves the last child as much as the first, our Creator, Life-Giving God loves the millions upon millions of His unique, beautiful, precious, valuable children. And because He is God, He gets to be present, in spirit, with every cluster of cells, sparking hearts into beating if that’s in the plan.

He’s there and sees each soul-beauty, spiritual beauty, and cellular beauty; and, in the rush of the rhythm of a new heartbeat and the tide of the amniotic sea He says,

“This is good. This is life. I love this one especially a lot.” 

And we learn, by his love that each is beautiful. Each child born, each woman gray, each old man bent, each and every awkward or neglected or cherished soul. I learned this again one sunshine drenched Sunday near Dilla, Ethiopia when a woman approached me after church with hugs and a prayer. Her name is Doncha, which means “beautiful”. Yes, she is.

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July 28, 2011 · 9:06 am

Push Mower Poetry {Intentionality in Living Beautifully}

Blade, blur, whirl

Through the grass.

Line, turn, line,

We push, we pass–

Slice, flick, fly

A carpet green

As emerald feathers

Newly preened.

Many years ago I worked for a woman with four boys ages twelve, four and an identical pair of 10 month-old twins. She was inundated with boyhood. Her household was so overstocked with males, the man-cave was the house not merely a room in the basement.

She mowed the grass for escape.

Why she cut grass for fun was beyond me.

But I was young then. Stepping fresh into married life, I had not yet experienced the shock of discovering how children could destroy the family room in less time than it takes to shower.

A couple years (ahem, decades) later, I get her. I really get her.

And each time I weed the garden or cut the grass I remember her wise–and exhausted–words:

“I cut the grass because it stays cut. It looks nice and clean and even and green for at least a few days-which is more than I can say for any room in my house!”

I mow the lawn for the same reason as my out-numbered friend. A freshly trimmed lawn makes me giddy, actually. My entire garden looks manicured and ready for a photo-shoot for House & Garden Magazine. Okay, almost that good.

Evenly clipped grass proffers the same aesthetic satisfaction as clean carpet does for a house. I could skip dusting for months and feel like my home is sparkling clean if the carpets are vacuumed, unstained and fluffy enough to nestle a sleeping newborn.

We recently purchased this nifty woman-powered push mower and I now get to call mowing a workout, too. I love feeling strong enough to push the sheering machine with it’s dangerous, spinning knives up and down the hill that is my front yard.

Those pirouetting blades slice a rhythm of white noise in the morning air that reminds me of the constant buzz of bees at my lavender (rather than the usual gas-powered drone). I huff in time to it’s beat as I tread straight paths.

My mower is beautiful.

It helps me bring order to my otherwise cluttered, creative, chaotic life. It draws me outdoors and into the sunshine. It makes me produce Vitamin D, boosts my metabolism and provides time alone (another reason my friend scheduled weekly lawn-mowing dates–she was nursing those twins!) that is precious and uninterrupted.

How do we seek out Beautiful and let her sink into our souls?

Seeking out beauty is an act of intention. Engaging in beauty is stepping beyond being entertained or distracted. It requires overturning stones and seeing the divine in the life that teems beneath, startling and unusual. Can I press against the walls of my imagination and search for something that does not appear beautiful that might hold true beauty?

Sometimes beauty demands difficult work. Creative work is messy and sometimes ugly. Childbirth is the perfect example of astounding beauty and messy humanity–but the gift of that new life, the sheer miraculousness of it — that is the splendor. Am I willing to push through the challenge to find the lovely reward? What if that challenge is an angry teenager or a disappointing marriage–am I willing to push through, breathe and reach for the beauty?

And, discovering beauty means appreciating the perfect moments without demanding perfection. My garden has taught me that as much as my marriage, my church or my family. Perfect moments are dewdrops suspended upon broken spiderwebs. Each watery orb bends light into miniature lenses, turning pictures of the landscape upside-down; catching light and throwing it in a dazzling game. Every one a perfect miracle set in the strands of brokenness.

photo by Bella Santos

There is beauty in the hushing, shushing song of my mower blades, music in the chatter of children playing, poetry in the tendril of a snap-pea vine. Beauty is there, a gift unwrapped and in plain view, holding it’s breath in suspense, wondering–will we see it today?

Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of lights,

with whom there is no variation or shadow of turning. {James 1:17}

This subject was prompted by The Bonnie Gray at Faith Barista

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