Good morning…
“These words from Frederick Buechner captured me this morning…enjoy!” said the text from my friend.
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Grace
AFTER CENTURIES of handling and mishandling, most religious words have become so shopworn nobody’s much interested anymore. Not so with grace, for some reason. Mysteriously, even derivatives like gracious and graceful still have some of the bloom left.
Grace is something you can never get but can only be given. There’s no way to earn it or deserve it or bring it about any more than you can deserve the taste of raspberries and cream or earn good looks or bring about your own birth.
A good sleep is grace and so are good dreams. Most tears are grace. The smell of rain is grace. Somebody loving you is grace. Loving somebody is grace. Have you ever tried to love somebody?
A crucial eccentricity of the Christian faith is the assertion that people are saved by grace. There’s nothing you have to do. There’s nothing you have to do. There’s nothing you have to do.
The grace of God means something like: “Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are, because the party wouldn’t have been complete without you. Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid. I am with you. Nothing can ever separate us. It’s for you I created the universe. I love you.”
There’s only one catch. Like any other gift, the gift of grace can be yours only if you’ll reach out and take it.
Maybe being able to reach out and take it is a gift too.
- Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words
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Buechner’s words add flesh to the bones of my favorite definition of grace, a definition I discovered long ago.
“There is nothing you can do
to make God love you more
and nothing you can do
to make God love you less.”
There is nothing you have to do. There is nothing you have to do. There is nothing you have to do. This, my friends, is the grace of God.
Perhaps being able to reach out and take the gift of grace is, in itself, the greatest gift of all.
For it’s by God’s grace that you have been saved. You receive it through faith. It was not our plan or our effort. It is God’s gift, pure and simple. You didn’t earn it, not one of us did, so don’t go around bragging that you must have done something amazing. For we are the product of His hand, heaven’s poetry etched on lives, created in…Jesus…to accomplish the good works God arranged long ago (Ephesians 2:8-10, VOICE).
Purely by the grace of God, heaven’s poetry is etched upon our lives.
…Sue…
