Common Grace

I often flounder when I try to use "religious" language, as I'm attempting to do now. The words of religion are understood to have very specific meanings by those who make it their life’s work to study God.  These words serve as convenient shorthand for complex concepts, much like the vocabularies of doctors, lawyers, and scientists.

Grace is one of those religious words that can seem to mean different things, in different contexts, to different people.  Often referred to as "God's unmerited favor", the word grace is used hundreds of times in the Bible.

For most of my life, the concept of grace has been more a comforting abstraction than a living reality.  I've had flashes of what it means, especially when my life was in turmoil, but once the crises passed, my epiphanies followed suit. Now that I'm in the middle of a new crisis, I'm again confronted by God's grace head on.

Ever since reading the book, Tuesdays with Morrie, I can't get Morrie's words out of my mind: "Most of us walk around as if we're sleepwalking. We really don't experience the world fully because we're half asleep, doing things we automatically think we have to do... Learn how to die, and you learn how to live."  Now that I know that I'm dying at a faster clip, I'm deliberately trying to wake up to everything around me.  And, in so doing, I'm becoming more aware of how God is working for good in and through the world.    Some people call this "common grace", and I'll adopt this term as my shorthand for a presence that defies attempts to define it, a presence that must be experienced to be understood, a presence that is nothing short of transcendent.  

In recent months I've begun to wake up and see God's common grace more clearly. It suffuses his creation and is planted in the hearts of all he made in his own image. I find it everywhere, inhabiting every corner of my world.  It’s evident in the countless acts of kindness by people I'm closest to and by people I've never even met, by people who share my faith and by people who don't.  And startlingly, it's evident in the lives of people I mistreated years ago who, nonetheless, love and support me. It's manifest in unceasing prayers and acts of encouragement to me and my wife; in unfailing accommodation by everyone to my physical limitations; in strong backs and skillful fingers helping me complete the "honey dos" that honey can no longer do; and in the requests for my help in a variety of ways, restoring to me a sense of accomplishment and making it possible to return grace to others.

I'd be lying if I said ALS hasn't tested my faith.  Some days I feel like I'm holding on by only the thinnest of threads.  But the grace I experience works on my heart.   It reveals a loving creator who gave me a way to both recognize and experience his presence.   And that makes me hold on.