Looking for Grace

In the midst of starting over, from a place I've been but haven't appreciated, I realized that there is still a lot I don't know. When you close your eyes and mind and soul down because you think you already have all the answers you keep yourself from what God desires for you to have. I have lived many years in this same location, seven to be exact, with my eyes closed and my heart disillusioned to what life really is and what it has to be in order for me to move forward. To live life fully in a place you did not plan to be is only difficult when you refuse to be pliable, to change, to bend with what God is saying for your life.

One of my favorite Christian Declarative songs is by the David Crowder Band. A line in "How He Loves" says this: "And He is jealous for me...Loves like a hurricane and I am a tree...Bending beneath the weight of His wind and mercy...When all of a sudden, I am unaware of these afflictions...Eclipsed by glory and I realize just how beautiful You are...And how great are Your affections for me..."

This song has been an anthem of grace for me...as I have been steadily looking for grace in the place where I am...this most unconventional place. You have to change your perspective to truly understand why you are in any given place at any given moment. There is no happenstance; there is no irony in God. He does not perform the miraculous in a haphazard way. Everything He does is deliberate and on purpose. I am learning every day that I too must take every step, appreciate every opportunity to grow, and look into the eyes of the people that cross my path with a God-smile on purpose, purposefully. As I am learning that grace is dangerous and delicious at the same time, that it is not a way to tie a bow on top of the gift that life is, I realize that like the words in this song, these words that are speaking of epiphany and discovery, my life is not meant to be lived in an aura of dissatisfaction with what God has given.

Like a little girl that receives something for Christmas she does not realize is something infinitely more valuable than the candy or toy or temporary distraction she had hoped for, I can hear the voice of my grandmother (whom believed in giving thanks no matter what) insisting: "Say thank you, MyMy."

God has given me His love in a way that says I either must surrender to it or be snapped in half at the weight of it. I have to not only bask in it for my own delight and be changed by it, but in order to get the full effect of it, I must take it in and then pour it out into the life of another. The ready ones have their hands cupped, waiting for me to give uniquely from me what God has prepared. I am learning this in a place God never said I would have to stay in to get the eternal necessities I was missing. He did not tell me all of the story; He just tolerated my anxiety when I realized the bottom was dropping out from under my plans. He did not warn me ahead of time that I better get confortable because my life would be starting over here - not because the life I had back home was so horrible, but because in the place of conformity and comfort I was the all sufficient one in my own mind and God Himself was an afterthought. He had other plans and I had the ones I thought were better.

But now...as I bend and sway to His will and open my eyes to His reality and Who He is, receiving and giving my all now instead of holding back, I know that there is nothing better than NOW and HERE and THIS.

Today is all that there is for me and that is simply enough. My hands do not have the capability to get all I need to have. I was not and will never be the One that blesses me with all these good things that come from the Father of Lights. The ability for an "ex nihilo" creation rests solely in Him. This jealous God who refuses to let me be a victim of my own sinfulness and selfishness and sadness loves me right out of myself. That is grace...real grace that reaches into the monuments I have built out of temporary moments and temporary people and temporary situations, as if He could never meet me here.. as if He could never wrap Himself in flesh again, incarnationally showing up. This too is grace...unconventional and freeing in an unexpected way: finally knowing that He can and He will and He does bless, create out of nothing, rescues, and then finally wraps Himself inside the answers to my needs.

Sometimes you realize this on the way, on the journey, when life reinvents itself and grace transforms your eyesight and not the thing you are looking at. I have taken the road less traveled this time. I am made new. I am learning to look for the grace in the eyes of others.

I saw grace yesterday. He had the most beautiful eyes and a Southern accent and a peace that drew me in. I saw grace yesterday when he told me about the life he was living, the way it was enough and the way it couldn't be enough forever because he feels the desire for more driving him closer to God. I saw grace when this beautiful man tried to cover up his beauty, until he was comfortable enough to reveal what others do not ordinarily see - his poetic soul. He had the most beautiful smile and the God shining through it reached out and removed the scales from my eyes. I am not caring about the way life can be shaped by the tangible when the intangible is so much more valuable; I am no longer disillusioned by the flesh that we exist in. It's just the fabric the treasure is wrapped in. Yesterday, I saw the diamond shining from within this one God had graced me to meet. God showed me His grace in this one that did not even recognize that the glory of God inside him was blinding me.

I once was blind to my surroundings and what is here that God wants to use to impact me and change me...and also those people and places and things that are to be impacted by me and changed by me, by these hands newly anointed to be like God's but are not God's. I once was blind to grace, but now I see. Now I see more than I ever could before, with God's glory blinding every part of the vision and overtaking it. I looked for grace, not love - as it has always been here. I am no longer looking for the love I think I want and have designed in my own mind as an unholy conglomeration of hodge-podge memories that have nothiong to do with God at all. And really God really is all I am seeking for...looking for...grasping for...and it doesn't matter where I land. I'll still be looking for Him, seeking Him out, delirious for His grace-touch again.

Grace is a discovery that can be found over and over again. There is never enough of it...and the places we think God does not exist or has given up on are most likely overflowing with grace. I cup my hands and try to hold on to it, even as it overflows me. I open my eyes and look for it...and all of a sudden, I am unaware of the afflictions I once believed existed here in this place. I am unaware of anything but the gorgeous freedom of living life with eyes wide open now.