his grace is sufficient

His Grace Is Sufficient

At first glimpse at this phrase, I thought to myself that the key word was “sufficient”. Then my eyes scanned backwards to “Grace”. Whose grace is it? It is His grace. Finally, “is” tells us so much. Lets break it down.

His…

I can extend grace all day long. I can tell you that it is all going to be okay. I can hold your hand or your hair back while you vomit. That is my grace. My grace cannot maintain the oxygen flowing through your blood. My grace cannot give you peace while you sleep or hope in the future. My powers of persuasion do not extend into the realm of the spiritual. His grace has a stamp of authority. You can trust it because he has been found trustworthy. He has earned the right to be heard, to be trusted, to be loved, and even to be worshiped.

Grace…

We are such consumers. My whole life growing up in the faith, I wanted to experience Grace. I wanted to be overcome, shuddering from the emotional ecstasy of acceptance. I wanted to hear a song or a sermon or read a poem and fall to the ground in tears with the Awakening of Gospel Truth. This is not grace. That is blessing. It can also go by the name of Christmas Morning, an event that is managed by Santa Claus, not a bloody Jew gasping for breath on a two planks of wood. Grace is something that we have all experienced. Adam and Eve experienced it in the garden when they sunk their perfectly straight and white teeth into the fruit. They didn’t know it at the time, but they should have died. It was the breath of the unspoiled God that was circulating through their blood and their blemish should have called for an immediate evacuation. Make no mistake, that air your breathing is Grace. Everyday that I am reminded of how I came into this world, I am aware, cognizant of Grace. But that is not experiencing it. I am constantly experiencing grace through every moment of everyday. The spiritual aspects are present. I know God, the Truth, has been revealed to me. I have been given talents. But less than that is simply the grace of being here. Feeling the grass beneath my toes, using the two eyes in my head to interpret the vision of spring or Saint Paul’s Cathedral, these things are grace, and they are as eternal and as infinite as the God who lavishes it.

Is…

Time is a number line with an infinite amount of points between 0 and 1. Grace is operating like this as well. Paul didn’t get his grace when the light blinded him or when the scales fell off of his eyes. David says in Psalm 139 “All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.” Therefore, we are in a constant state of grace since before the day we went slipping down the birth canal. That is the genius of Paul’s writing.

Sufficient…

To her mom: What more could you want? You have kids. You have friends. You have people that consider themselves dependant on you. You are needed. You are the manifestation of grace in your daughter’s lives. Justin Fisher held on and never gave up hope. Long after he could no longer experience a blade of grass across his toes, he held on. Frederick Buechner said that to write was “to open a vein.” To live is to do the same. We have to respond to the grace of God by opening our veins to one another and bleed our way to healing. We own it to one another to hang on. And the fact is, we can hang on as long as the heart pumps oxygen to the lungs and to the brain. The grace that has been given to us is enough. We have a responsibility to make it, even if that is all it is, until the next Christmas morning. Even if that morning is eternity, when it comes is not up to us to decide.

knowing each other...

Here are some selections from a recent Relevant Magazing article...for the full deal, go to http://www.relevantmagazine.com/life_article.php?id=7391

..."We live in a world where success is being polished, put-together and cutting edge. Even our junk, if we admit to having it, needs to be of a certain type—needs to be cool, extreme or counter-cultural. Nobody wants to just be a mess. We have to spin our stuff just right or figure out which tone of voice to say it in, to make sure that when people hear us, we come out looking good. So we learn the tricks. We pick up a vocabulary that makes our struggles sound mild (really, we have it all together) or interesting (don’t you just wish you could be as cynical/jaded/messed up as me?), and we shade everything we say just right.

So nobody ever knows us.

But the fact is that we were made to be known, both by God and by other people. Allowing others to know us is terrifying, and sometimes we get burned, but the alternative is worse. Because without the vulnerability and openness that real relationship requires, we live our lives cold and alone, starving for community that we just can’t find any other way.

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