L. Scott Ekstrom – Writer

The following is an excerpt from the upcoming book, Sainthood for the Middle-Aged. Copyright 2021 by L. Scott Ekstrom. All rights reserved.

“I have tried so to write the first chapter that those who can’t bear such a story will see at once what they are in for and close the book with the least waste of time.” 

-C. S. Lewis

If I believed people were basically good, or very good at knowing who we were and what we wanted; that the surest path to happiness was to do our duty, or be true to ourselves by pursuing our dreams . . .

If I believed what the world needed most was for the best people to take the culture by force and coerce the worst into living better . . .

If I believed authentic faith was immediately evident or that we could know which and whose sins were the most heinous, and we should never or always discuss our own . . .

If I believed the Spirit of God did not still speak to the spirits of women and men, or that He will ever contradict something He already told us all through His Word . . .

If I believed Christ’s birth and life were anything less than a miracle; that his death was not the worst and best thing to ever happen; or that it effected an automatic turning point for all, whether they fell at His feet or spit in His face . . .

If I believed the Resurrection was anything less than the Body of God rising from the dead . . .

Then the life I hope to live and the book I have tried to write would be, for better or worse, very different from what they are. 

For what I do believe, for starters, is that the Three-in-One God, who created the universe and sustains it still, knew, before He also created me in His good image, that I was prone, at least from birth, to mar that image beyond recognition, forever vacillating between the yin and yang of self-destruction and self-worship.  But He loved me enough to come down the mountain—to live a beautiful life, die an ugly death, and, through Word and Spirit one winter’s night over three decades ago, to walk further still; down basement stairs and into my pimpled soul, descending even into the hell of my own making, to kiss my every sin with death and life and love and then, ascend with me in His arms—saved by grace, only grace.

My first book began there and was about “His continual mercy set in stark relief against my near-continual rebellion,” moving through, as I marked it, the end of youth:  my mid-thirties.  This one, sort of, picks up the same story later on, though with less drama and a more meandering narrative, as is, I suppose, befitting a man now in his forties who no longer notes each passing year as a personal epoch.  Much has changed and I don’t know what’s next.  But even after all these years, with all the surprises about the way things turned out, or didn’t, I remain amazed by what has stayed the same. 

Melodramatic (or arrogant) as it may sound, as a teenager experiencing new birth, I somehow knew I had encountered the unchanging dogma that upholds the world: Christ Alone.  All these years later, even after so many doubts and disasters of an ordinary life, I still know. It’s all about grace.  And also, still, be it a whim of vanity or the press of Love, I feel the need to share that story, with friends and strangers who may relate to it some or not at all.  Whether anyone else feels the need to read it is, perhaps, not important, or even any of my business.  I am not the point.  I just believe there is one. 

All that to say:  Here goes something.