Tag Archives: salvation

December 14, 2012 · 8:35 am

{Advent} When Heaven Came Down

'sky' photo (c) 2006, wonderferret - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

It was the quietest of nights.

It was the most insignificant of cities.

It was the remotest corner.

But what happened there changed the course of humanity.

No one knew when the labor pains began except for his young, inexperienced mother.

No one heard his first quivering cries, except for his father.

But all heaven rejoiced. And good news traveled on the rush of angels’ wings to light up dark skies as a corner of heaven peeked through the dark curtain of night.

And shepherds–terrified and breathless–collapsed on rocky soil, blinded by the brightness of the messengers.

The messenger spoke, shook the ground and changed everything:

Do not be afraid.

For unto you this day a Savior is born in the city of David, who is Christ the Lord.

And multitudes of angels, millions upon millions of them joined in song. The jubilant chorus poured down light on dirty sheep-tenders–those men of the earth whose beards smelled of the smoke of their small fires–transforming their rough, hard-living faces into expressions of childlike awe.

Glory to God!

Glory to God in the Highest.

And on Earth, Peace and Goodwill to men.

The curtain closed. The night sky in its velvet black closed upon them. A sheep bleated and men remembered to breathe air again.

And once again, it was the quietest of nights.

For the simple shepherds this night would be the most sacred. It was the moment heaven met them. They went to the baby, wrapped in clothes, lying in a manger in the remote corner of that insignificant city of Bethlehem. They worshipped what they didn’t yet understand. What they had witnessed was heaven eclipsing the darkness of the sky and a baby emerging into a merciless world. It made little sense, but it was worthy of quiet awe.

Thirty years passed and multitudes gathered again–this time on the shore of Lake Galilee and in the temple courtyard and on the side of the ancient mountain.

And the multitudes listened and followed and begged for help. They ate and they questioned and they praised with branches of palm. Could it be possible that a shepherd from that night long ago found a place among the crowd?

And then the multitudes gathered again.

It was Passover in Jerusalem and the crowds came in sets of families and clans. They saw the babe, now a man known to claim that he was the Son of God. He gave them signs and miracles; he gave them forgiveness and truth and healing. But he failed to be the king they were seeking. He was a Nazarene, and nothing worthwhile came from Nazareth. He was an insignificant sham. The crowds gathered as storm clouds, piling up, rumbling and seething. The multitudes shouted demands that the innocent man be traded for a seasoned criminal named Barabas. Who would listen now to a shepherd’s tale of singing angels and the infant promise of the prophet Isaiah? The mob pulsed with fury. The exchange was made: a criminal set free for the price of innocent blood.

And they scattered into the darkness again.

For it was the darkest of days.

And just at the moment that Heaven might have sewn the drape of Heaven shut, it was torn in two. Dawn came with the nervous clamor as the women’s sandals climbed the path to the tomb. The multitudes were gone. The shepherds tended flocks, the farmer plowed, the fishermen talked of returning to their nets, but the women came bearing the spices of the dead.

They were met with the brilliance of heaven and words that shook the earth:

Do not be afraid.

The One you are seeking is not here.

He has risen from the Dead.

***

Advent is looking for the “Coming, especially someone of importance”. What do we look for? A baby in a manger? A victorious king? A kind man? A miracle worker? Or, do we look for a risen king? What leaves us breathless in expectation?

Philippians 2 tells us that Jesus will receive his glory and coronation because of the cross. One day the multitudes of millenniums will bow at the name and glorious title: Jesus Christ, King of All.

Friend, we are the criminals set free for the price of innocent blood! That is the gift of Christmas. We have that old, old story etched on the scrolls of history and retold myriad times in the lives redeemed by the baby of Bethlehem.

We have only to turn to the word to pull back heaven’s curtain to see the glory of the story of Jesus, to hear the angel’s song in our dark souls, to peer into the empty tomb and watch him ascend into glory. We would have no Christmas season without that precious book and the story of our Savior. Read Luke 2 as if you’ve never heard it before. Like the shepherds of old who gazed and wondered at the host of angels and the helpless baby, run to the One who was born that night and make today the day your knee will bow and your tongue confess that Jesus Christ, is Lord.

Blessings,

Alyssa

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September 21, 2012 · 2:12 am

A wide path {a story of hurt, home and hope}

'Kyoto Temple Front' photo (c) 2008, Tatyana Temirbulatova - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

“You have made a wide path for my feet to keep them from slipping.” {Psalms 18:36}

Although I had multiple fractures in my left leg and an incision ten inches long from my sternum to my belly button, held together with staples, they sent me home from the hospital with a walker, not a wheelchair.

For almost two weeks, my only job was to begin recovery; my days were filled with pain management, morphine hallucinations, a constant stream of beautiful friends and family, and the excruciating  initiation into physical therapy.

The day came when my lung (once crushed and residing near my shoulder) was healed to the point that my oxygen intake levels were declared “a-ok” and I was told I could go home. Home.

Home is where we were heading when the drunk driver failed to stop at the sign and blazed across the highway.

Honestly, I was scared to go home.

I was so weak, so plagued with pain…how could I go home? Home is where I take care of my family, cook dinners, do endless loads of laundry, clean things I never thought I’d be so undignified to clean; home is where I work. This work shapes so much of my identity, my value and purpose. Could I really rest at home?

I had only hopped with my walker out of my room and down the trauma ward hall about three feet before I was overcome with exhaustion and had to return to bed and the ice packs that hugged my legs. How could I “walk” into my house, down the hall and to my room?

How could I do anything? How could I do home?

My sister picked me up from the hospital. I knew a ramp had been constructed by good friends and people from our life group with materials supplied by a local hardware store. When we pulled into the garage and I saw that long, long uphill ramp, I nearly locked the car doors and insisted I be returned to the hospital, but home also held everyone who means the most to me.

On this late August afternoon, my family anticipated my return, because to them, home is me.

Each hop burned through my abdominal muscles and I had to stop three times on my trip up the ramp and then navigate the threshold of the laundry-room door.

When I took my hop into our family room and saw all that had been done for us, the cleaning, the arranging, the widening of paths for the walker to fit, my kids and cards and flowers, I stopped and sobbed.

My cry caught in my throat, raw and rasped, the throat that had held the tubes that kept me alive, the oxygen that my body needed, and came out low and loud and uncontrolled. And I stood — I stood — on one good leg and grasping hard the handles of my walker and thanked God for home, for the wide paths that my caring people made for us, for wide open arms that welcomed me and the wide open space of this wild life and the chance to keep living it.

My husband and I were both broken, both using walkers for a while. We had to take turns moving through the kitchen or journeying down the hallway. Sometimes we laughed at the slow train we made together, us with our broken legs and plates and screws and walkers, but sometimes we cried. For we passed through a narrow shaft of destruction and found ourselves pulled through into wide, wonderful life again; and when I think about that, really think about what a gift, a glimmer of the miraculous that life is, well, it always makes me cry.

***

Dear Friends,

Thank you for sharing a bit of my story. When I think about the verse above, I am humbled by the care our Heavenly Father demonstrates to prepare our way to keep our feet from slipping. I’m not the most coordinated person, sometimes I trip over my own feet. It doesn’t take much to trip me up in faith, either. Sometimes we face tremendous challenges, like the one I wrote about today, but sometimes we trip up in our walk with Jesus even when nothing’s really going wrong. Is it just me, or does that happen to you, too?

God is intimately concerned about your journey, about your spiritual safety, so to speak. Our paths may converge with danger or wind through uncertainty or dip into depression, because life is challenging, not a cakewalk. But despite the twisting and turning, we can always trust that we walk a steady, smooth, wide path of faith because Jesus himself broadened the road for us. He wants to keep our feet from slipping, he is concerned with our safety and our ability to keep on going. Even when every move was painful for me I remembered that no pain that I suffered could be greater than the pain my savior suffered for me. My sinfulness compelled him to make a way for me to know God.

In ancient times, when a king was planning to travel to a city, a contingency would go out ahead and build up the road, smooth it and make it ready for the royal caravan. Often roadways made of dirt would get deep ruts from the traffic and the weather. I saw roads like this in Ethiopia — unfit to drive a car upon and dangerous for the walker. We had to pay close attention to our footfalls to ensure we didn’t lose our footing, and our balance. God is showing us in this verse, just how much he thinks of us by making our road smooth and wide so that we can keep on this journey of life toward eternity with him.

Jesus thinks you’re worth the effort it took to make the path to him smooth and wide. Won’t you join him in the journey?

Blessings,

Alyssa

 

linked with Lisa-Jo for Five Minute Friday , this week’s word: Wide

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August 24, 2012 · 2:09 pm

The Secret of Those Who Truly Live {and how you can, too}

I’ve been rolling the word rescue in my mind the way one might roll a marble in her hand. It is round and has no edges or sides and moves at the slightest touch.

To be rescued is an event, an intervention, that is difficult to place on a shelf or the timeline of your existence where it can be easily displayed or pointed to with a proclamation, “Here is the day I was rescued.”

Sure, there was a day, a time, when I was rescued. I can point to August 14, 2011 about 10:30 p.m. and say, “that’s when everything changed.” It divided my life into before and after.

Yet being rescued in the intense way that I was, with tubes and oxygen, the deft hand of knowledgable surgeons, the flight of a helicopter, the call to prepare a table for my broken body, the prayers and the pumping heart, the shocked organs crushed and waiting repair, well, it defies defining. This kind of rescue cannot be carefully placed in a slot and hidden away like a photograph in an album.

This kind of rescue is worn like a band on my finger.

It is the salt in my tears.

It is borne in my scars and my smile.

It has become a part of who I had been before and who I must be forever after.

It is beyond defining because it has defined me.

And the question that any survivor, anyone who’s ever been hopeless and utterly dependent on the salvation brought by the hand of another, must consider is this:

What have I been saved unto? 

If I have been rescued from something, what am I rescued toward?

To deny the search for the answer to that line of query is, in my opinion, dangerous. It leads to some sort of slow death.

I can’t be in awe of every moment, every breath, every dazzling morning ray of sun filled with dancing dust, but I must be willing to be. This is the purpose of being rescued: to give the dying a chance to truly live.

Jesus said that “I come that you might have life and have it to the full!”

Do you know Jesus? Not just the name, but the person and deity that he is? Have you chosen to accept his salvation from a human life trapped in brokenness, sin and separation from God? If you have, you are my audience today. You are the rescued, the ones who claim the crazy nickname “born again believer” because there’s just no better way to describe it. Here is my question for you:

Are you living fully? Are you experiencing joy full-to-bursting in every aspect of your life?

Okay, maybe not every minute of every hour, for we still dwell in a broken place, but the real question is: are you willing?

Are you willing to see your salvation in Jesus as the very thing that defines who you were before and who you’ll be forever afterward? Or, is your marriage, career, education, political views, neighborhood, accomplishments, or your physical appearance shaping your life and informing your future?

Are you satisfied with the shallow puddle of peace as defined by the “absence of conflict” or are you willing to trust your Savior to have the power to provide peace that is so deep is passes all understanding?

Do you define your relationship with Jesus in tidy phrases that describe the time when you became a Christian at summer camp or sunday school or are you rolling rescue in your mind daily asking the One who’s saved you,

“Hey Jesus? So what have you saved me unto today?

Since I’m here and breathing air and thinking thoughts and eating good food, what have you got me here for today?

How can I be in your salvation fully this day in these relationships in this hour and in this place?”

Has your moment of rescue come in and made a mess of your life, wrecked your ideas and claimed your dreams and made your existence brilliant in the grace of it all?

I hope so.

That’s the only way to truly live.

Take it from me. I’ve been rescued.

***

Bless you friends, for reading my life in typograpy. I am thankful you’re here. I am praying for you. Live dazzlingly today.

Alyssa

Linked with FaithFilled Fridays

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March 20, 2012 · 10:51 am

Scars of My Salvation

I have a blister on my right hand.

It’s a round and angry scarlet wound. I hope it leaves a mark. I want to remember how it got there, remember the day, the very hour of the day, the slant of the sun and the brush of the spring wind across my hair.

I want to recall without the haze of time casting gauzy skirts across my memory like a careless dancer.

I need to hold fast to that moment that I was born again.

A pregnancy season rubs its memorial into skin stretched tight over full, round belly – the marks that remain, shiny and white-pink tell the story of life. Unsightly to some, they mark the birth of life, the beginning of something utterly profound and mysterious. They mark motherhood and tell a tale of hope and future.

Other scars–and I have them–mark the passage of different stories.

Tales of horror and healing, of late night wreckage scattered on black highway, of swirling lights flashing red and blue, of crying children and a mother who cannot hold them. Tales of thrumming helicopter blades and the glimmer of a precision blade held fast in a skilled hand, of thread and staples that hold life together when it seems to be coming apart like a fragile bit of lace.

But this blister, this place rubbed raw is a wound that must be kept with its sisters scarring this body of mine. This vessel of growing and birthing and suffering and surviving.

This small planet of pain I wear on my hand is proof that I made it this far.

It came from gardening without gloves.

Warmth popped into a March day like a dear old friend for tea and begged me out to the garden. I had a physical therapy appointment scheduled, but I cancelled and set up an altogether different therapy regimen for the day. Instead of the leg workout, I’d walk across the yard several times. Instead of the ab workout, I’d scrape rake tines over stubborn weeds and dry clumps of leaves and form piles.

I needed to see the familiar green spikes of the daffodil, the bare ruby-colored nubs of peonies pushing through.

I needed life in the version that only a Northwest spring could deliver.

So I raked and yanked and worked. I lived. I live.

And in the cooling air of late afternoon, when the sun began to look sleepy as it hung over the tops of the pines, my hand throbbed. It beat with the pulse of a heart that has yet to stop.

It pounded, sore and yelled in a silent voice: this is what it means to be born again.

To taste and know certain death but instead be gifted with life, with more, with pulse-pounding joy and interminable sorrow, with freedom and movement and prayer and the love of good people. To feel.

This is fellowship, this blistering wound of a life lived raw and real, full.

I want a scar from the day I was born again.

///

Do you have scars like this? Wounds from salvation’s touch? Do you embrace them or hide them? Do you tell their story?

Linked with Journey to Epiphany,  Shanda, Just Write

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November 15, 2011 · 9:00 pm

{Tears}

They’ve been showing up often these days.

Unbidden and not always welcome, however I’m learning to accept their presence.

These tears of mine.

I squeeze my eyes, swallow hard, screw up my face to hold them in, but they insist on spilling.

I’m a strong person, logical and sensible, and although I experience emotions, I don’t enjoy readily putting them on display. Crying makes me puffy and pink.

And vulnerable.

But I’m learning to see these tears differently.

They’ve become

little baptisms of the spirit, tiny floods of praise,

rivulets of gratitude and pools of praise.

This christening of tears is a dedication to my Savior and a renewal of who I want to be in him. Like a helpless baby, I’ve been saved, rescued, given life anew and I’m swaddled in grace, cradled in love, rocked by the strong right arm of God. And that is the only place I want to  be.

Because friend, life can knock the wind out of you.

The unexpected can threaten and loom and like gale-force winds, rip through your life to the very foundation of who you are. And when that happens, when all you’ve worked for and all you’ve lived for is pulled off, when you are no longer

wife,

daughter,

sister,

co-worker,

friend,

enemy,

mother,

leader,

follower

and you are just and only you, the material of your foundation is all that matters.

There will come a day when there is only breath available for a few words. What will they be?

Mine were:

Help

God

And the rest was spirit; my body couldn’t produce the words, my mouth couldn’t form them, even my mind could not think them. If the last two words I ever spoke were those two, it would be enough. God would help.

God would help in the way that would be best for me. Because he loves me and he made a promise. He answered my prayer and provided people to save my life. And although there has been (and is) suffering, I am still, always, forever, in his hand. And the words I speak daily are the same: Help God.

So the tears are welcome friends. And sometimes, when I am alone (or feel alone) and I breathe with lung repaired, I let the tears come baptize me again because they remind me of who I really am.

I am God’s child.

And all the other labels slip off — sister, friend, wife, daughter, mother…I am no longer clothed in the filmy, flimsy garments of this world, but I am made bare, humbled in the presence of God. Untethered and unfettered, I am free to accept his help.

Friend, his hand is there for you. And his hand is mighty.

He is strong enough to pull you out and up from any earthly mess.

And you do not need to worry. He cares for you.

Even when no one else does. Even when the people who should care, don’t. Even when you are alone in a river of tears, he cares for you. He will help.

“Humble yourselves, therefore, under God’s mighty hand; that he may lift you up in due time. Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you. And the God of all grace, who called you to his eternal glory in Christ, after you have suffered a little while, will himself restore you and make you strong, firm and steadfast.” {1Peter 5:6,7,10}

And that’s why I sometimes cry.

I submerge myself in the waters of this world and come up renewed, remade, recreated in the life of Christ.

If it takes tears to fill that baptismal, so be it.

Because life apart from Jesus is no life at all.


 

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