Made to change the world…
”My boys have been at a new school for the past 10 days. Due to the sudden and sad closure of our small Christian school, they are now at our local public elementary school.
I spent the summer trying not to worry about my tender hearted fifth grade boy being the new kid in a big school. My puny, faithless prayers went something like this: “Please God, don’t let him get bullied!”
When I dropped my oldest son off on the first day of school, he was standing alone while all the other students were in groups of friends. That afternoon at school pick-up I asked, “How’d it go?”
When he answered, “not good” all my fears bum rushed me.
“Really? What happened.” He went on to detail how one boy was getting bullied in class. He went over and sat right next to him so that he wasn’t sitting alone. Then he told me about a boy who tried to deceive one of the Muslim girls thinking that she wouldn’t know the difference. My son told the girl not to believe this boy because he was trying to trick her. He talked about how some of the students were saying mean things about their teacher when they didn’t even know her yet.
Why did my son have a bad day? It wasn’t because he didn’t have any friends. It was because of the injustice around him.
I thought about this for an hour and then walked over and confessed that my prayers for him had been too small. I had fallen into the parent trap of wanting my kid to be ‘safe and happy’ when that’s not what he’s made for. Like all kids, especially Christian kids, he’s not made to be safe.
He’s made to change the world.
We discussed the CS Lewis quote, “you don’t know how crooked a stick is until you lay a straight stick next to it.” Maybe this boy of mine is the straight stick. Maybe he’s in that class because those kids need to see a real-life fifth-grade version of justice and kindness. When I started talking about how he’s had five years of right-side-up teaching and relationships and expectations at his Christian school he cut me off and said, “Maybe God has been preparing me for this.”
In the last 10 days, he has comforted sad classmates, helped kids who were being cheated during games at recess, and apologized to his substitute teacher for the (truly horrible) behavior of his peers.
I do still pray that he makes friends. Lifelong friends. But what’s even more important is God doing something through this 11 year old that He can’t do through anyone else.
Lesson for me: No more praying out of fear. I hope I don’t have to learn it again.”
– Katy Faust
Tag: Christianity
Is it true that Eostre was misinterpreted as being an ancient pagan godess, when in fact it was simply the name of a month?
I don’t know the exact etymological origins of Easter, nor what Eostre is exactly. All I can tell you is that anyone who uses “Eostre” as evidence that Easter is a pagan tradition is a charlatan; if you look at the word for the holiday in basically any other language, it is a variation of Passover/Pesach.
A lot of these loose connections between Christian terms and “pagan” terms are actually very English centric
You can only make a haphazard connection between the word Eoster and the Christian celebration of Easter if you are thinking in the context of the English language.
Here’s how you say Easter in various other languages:
- Spanish: Pascua
- Portuguese: Páscoa
- French: Pâques
- Italian: Pasqua
- Romanian: Pasti
- Greek: Paskha
- Danish: Paaske
- Russian: Paskha
In most, if not all of these cases, the word for Easter doubles as the word for the Jewish Passover. So for a good part of the Christian word, the word for Easter is completely unrelated to this “Eostre.” In some countries, it’s simply called “Resurrection Festival.”
This sort of reminds me of a claim from that Zeitgeist movie, about how supposedly the term “Son of God” came from the phrase “Sun of God” somehow indicating that Christianity was derived from pagan sun worship. But again, this is a very ignorant and English centric claim, because it assumes that the words “son” and “sun” sound the same in every language on earth.
By the way, if you find movies like the Zeigeist as painfully annoying as I do, here’s a good article on the inaccuracies presented in the movie.
Plus. Eostre is a Germanic word, from Central Europe, and Christianity first took root in the Middle East and Mediterranean. So yeah, anyone who makes that claim is ignorant of both etymology and history.
“The more I went through the motions of believing in God, the more the world made sense to me.”
“I was caught in a no-man’s land between finding the case for Christianity extremely compelling, and not being able to take the leap to belief because I could not prove it to be true.
I didn’t know where to turn, so I decided to do an experiment: something rang true about Augustine’s famous statement that you must believe so that you might understand, and so I began to live my life as if God did exist. I prayed, even though I felt like I was talking to myself; I followed the Christian moral code; I read the Bible and honestly tried to understand what it might be trying to teach me. I conformed my life to a God-centered life, even thought I wasn’t sure I believed that God existed.
There was no big thunder-and-lightning encounter with Jesus, and, frankly, I only rarely “felt” God’s presence. But once I began this experiment, it was as if some hidden, tremendously powerful magnet had been activated within me that began pulling me in one direction. One odd “coincidence” after another formed a breadcrumb trail to lead me to God, and it sure did seem like some external force was acting in my life in a real way.
But the most interesting part was this:
The more I went through the motions of believing in God, the more the world made sense to me; the more human history made sense to me; the more I started to make sense to me. The picture of human life that I’d formed based on science alone now seemed incomplete. I still believed everything I’d learned through the lens of science, but I now saw a whole other dimension to the world around me. It was like the difference between looking at a picture of a double-fudge chocolate cake and having one in front of me to smell, touch, and taste: everything I knew before was still there, but I was now experiencing it in a much more intense and vivid way.”
Wide Spread Interests 