We need to own up to our emptiness. To say we are not okay, and then to get up and find other people who are not okay, and that’s how we’ll be okay. That means you and I can’t flinch when someone tells us about it. If we do not have hope of an undeserved grace, then we can never be honest, and then we will never get grace. But if we can be recklessly honest about our hungry wandering souls, then maybe we can find restoration, and we might just make it. This sort of dirty grace confronts the ugliness inside, grabs it by the fistfuls, and kills it with the relentless violence of love. It’s not the textbook grace you put on like a cheap dress. It hurts like crazy: but afterward there is stillness and peace, like the morning. It’s like beginning again. If you’ve never felt that, it’s probably because we’ve been masquerading by being nice all the time, when really this grace thing is a dirty business that rips the curtain of your religious activity to shreds. You’ll recognize that God loved your broken mess from the start, and He won’t stop there. Only God could ever simultaneously love us as we are now and love us into a different kind of person. Both are impossibly true. But it begins when you receive that sort of grace today, right now, where you are. And it takes a lifetime to get it. — J.S.
Posted on: Thu, 15 Jan 2015 01:00:00 +0000
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