Grace

Grace

This morning I read Ephesians 2:1-10.  And it prompted the following thoughts.  I'm sharing here, word for word, what I wrote in my journal this morning. 

The word "grace" draws me.  Maybe because I feel anything but graceful.   My mind automatically goes to dancers.  How they move fluidly with the music.  How clumsy I feel when I try to dance.  How I yearn to move freely in rhythm and grace.

But the idea of gracefulness extends beyond movement.  There are some people who are just so gracious.  Joyce Weaver and Crysti Landis come to mind right away.  Always welcoming, always with a kind word.  But as I write that I know it's not totally true.  Both those women would tell me that they have times of ungraciousness.  I just happen to not see that.

I looked up the word "grace" in the dictionary and it leaves me wanting.  "Unmerited divine assistance given humans for their regeneration or sanctification."

This is the "religious" meaning of grace.  The combination of those words leaves me feeling cold and dead.  Just like religion.

I'm watching the sunrise as I write this.  The trees with tiny buds are silhouetted against a sky that has gone from black to deep blue to a tinge of yellow, to a combination of tangerine, dusty rose, purple.  It makes my lips turn up in a smile.  It makes my heart feel light.  It makes me feel alive.

Just like grace.

God's grace.

I see grace in the sunrise.  How God can take a life that is as black as night and transform it into a breath-taking masterpiece of light and color.  How something that once seemed dead and hopeless can dawn into something vividly alive and inspiring.

I am undone.

Jesus, do this in me.