My birth name is Aletra, but I go by “Alexa” now for reasons very significant to me. I lived in Colorado into my teens then moved to Vegas; we didn’t like the idea of raising kids there, though, so we moved to the most beautiful region on the West Coast.

 …Our wedding day, 1990

 Eighteen years later…

I live in the Pacific Northwest with my musician/chaplain husband, Richard, and five of our six children (see my “Seven Years, Eight Thanksgivings” post for more info on our heaven-dweller, Riál).

Laughter is absolutely the most wonderful gift we have to offer our children. We love that we can be silly around one another without fearing the cricket chirps and resounding dead silence when others don’t “get” us.

I am a Christian through and through but you won’t find me preaching or speaking “Christianese” in my blog. Jesus Christ is the underlying theme of all my life experiences and my Solid Rock. I am dreadfully human and I am challenged to trust Him each day. Above all, my entries/stories/articles are without façade. Life is too short to pretend I have the corner market on anything.

My Christian journey began in 1989 in a pharisaical church —- only I didn’t know it. It wasn’t until 2003 that Christ began unraveling that fabric and patiently helped me to see that I had Him all wrong. In the context of fresh appreciation of the wonders of His grace, Rob Bell’s books Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith  and Jesus Wants to Save Christians prompted me to consider that my Christianity must be relevant to our time — God is unchanging, but the world is not.

I also like a book by Donald Miller called Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality. It’s kind of wordy, but unpretentious and as familiar as an author can sound to a reader, and you either appreciate his style, or you don’t. Both of the above books have helped me to leave behind the destructive type of Christianity that I was once too blind to see. I still have many scales to shed from my eyes…

Most recently I have read The Shack by William P. Young. I am not into the “must read” book fads within the American Church, but if any book has revealed the inadequacies of any box I fabricate to contain my notion of God, it’s this one.

© Alexa Lopez