Grace – Amazing Grace
Grace is a complex thing. It still confounds my mind on most days. I know what it means, but I don’t really ‘get’ it’s meaning. When I find myself bumping into it, I am in a place where I need it profoundly.
I have been visiting with this thing called grace this last week as I come to grips with some difficult choices I have made in my life. And yet, the choices were made. How does one reconcile this? Take it to the cross where the debt was paid, the choices forgiven, the burdens lifted and the sin tossed as far as the east is from the west. I know this is the path but sometimes it is difficult to get there.
What is grace? In relationship with Jesus, it is God’s unmerited favor. Unmerited means ‘not adequately earned or deserved.’ Favor is ‘an act of kindness beyond what is due or usual.’
Grace is receiving something good no matter how many bad choices we have made or will make. Whether coerced choices or ones that are more culpable, grace is available. Grace is sparing us from the dire consequences of our ‘choices’, regardless of their origin. When one comes from a place a harm, it is even more complex.
When injustice occurs, we begin to measure God’s grace by and against our own human experiences. Why do bad things happen to good people? Why do children get hurt when they are innocent? Why do the kindest people get cancer? Those are the things that tweak our minds about life and grace. Additionally, as human beings, we tend to measure our ‘goodness’ and ‘badness’ based on our behavior/choices. We hand down judgments on ourselves which preclude any other truth. We want to be able to measure ourselves and others intellectually and emotionally based on what we can see and understand.
As with many things that involve faith, we sometimes must grapple and then choose to believe. Jesus is okay with the grappling my friends. He wants us to grapple with Him. He can take it.
The complexity come when we evaluate coerced choice and choices made as adults. Being a child at the mercy (or lack thereof) of the parental units or other adults, is one thing. It’s evil, no matter what language. Choices made when there is a more adult understanding and knowledge are a more difficult reality to reconcile. We have an intellectual understanding that being an ‘adult’, automatically makes us more culpable. Is this true? I don’t know. It is more complex, for sure.
It is easier to have grace for my 6 year old self or even my 13 year old self, but what of my 18 year old self or beyond? How about you?
But that’s not what this post is about…I digress. It is complicated.
GOOD NEWS, in the Kingdom of God, there is only one shade of Grace. It is the gift that is given to us from the lover of our souls. All souls, all ages, from all corners of the earth. The abused and the abuser, if we seek it. It is a gift that no one can earn, bargain for, or buy.
Grace is not something we can earn- wow! That is where it gets sticky for me. I am a doer, a performer, an over-achiever. I was the teacher’s pet & the ‘goody two shoes’. My whole life was about earning a place out of the pain and abuse that was my life. This idea of receiving something without paying for it, is unfathomable.
But GRACE, grace is receiving something that we can do NOTHING to earn. I have been a believer in Jesus since I was 8 years old where I knelt in front of a plastic Sunday school chair. I just knew I wanted the Jesus in the picture to love and hold me. I believed I was bad, intrinsically bad. His eyes were so kind and He was holding all those cute children in that picture. Only recently, have I entered completely into that picture. A picture and reality where my child self is the one held by Him. Completely consumed by His love.
Grace is God’s love that pursues us when we have nothing to offer. It finds us in the deepest corners of our minds. His love and grace says ‘I died for this, yes, even this.’
Grace is perfect love coming at you that has nothing to do with you. Like a wave, like a gentle wind. Like adrenaline straight to the heart.
Grace is being loved when you are unlovable. It is not about anything intrinsically good in us, nor is it denied to us if we feel intrinsically bad. I long for the day when I can more fully embrace this truth. I’m not there yet, just sharing a transparent journey.
Friends, we don’t have to be good enough, more, better or sin free. He just wants us willing to look at Him and the gift He offers so that it can heal us.
To be loved THIS WAY is grace. It is free. It is without ANY cost at all. It is incomprehensible, largely because it is only something that Jesus can offer us in this way. As humans who desire to be more like Him, we try. We fail. We try again. We borrow the grace that we have received in a hearts effort to give what we have received.
Grace is a new shower every day.
I don’t know about you but that’s what makes it possible to go sleep at night.
Are you longing to be washed clean? To be loved so perfectly that you can’t even believe it? It’s there. Come as you are ♡