Under Grace

It is hard to live under grace.  It is hard to accept love without condition, without deserving any part of this favor shown me.  To be loved not because I'm beautiful, or joyful, or good at washing dishes.  To be loved not because I clean without being asked, or that I cook well, or that I am ever patient and kind.  Loved because I am loved is hard to let be.

As I drive to visit my brother, I think hard on Galatians 2, freeing my head from my selfish desires for the first time in far too long.  I try to reason out what it means, these life feeding verses, and how it is no longer I who live.  Sun above me sharply glints against crisply reddened leaves.  The sky spreads its arms wide to embrace my adventure.  How is it no longer I who live, but Christ Who lives in me?  My sins weigh heavily on me, even as I turn my glad face to the day.

Some people seem born to a holiness beyond what I will ever know this side of eternity.  I have to slaughter myself daily in order to live in any semblance of holy.  Would that I had cut off both hands and feet and ears and eyes and tongue...my mind would still corrupt and boil within me.  Yet I have been crucified with Christ.

I want to deserve the immensity given to me.  To pay back somehow for some small portion of this blessedness.  I try harder, always trying harder, always more prone to fall harder.  I refuse to meet God's eye, angry with myself for falling?  Or is it anger with Him for letting me fall?  I demand my own perfection sullenly, thinking that surely this time I have done enough wrong for many lives.  No more, please.  Take this dish back to the kitchen.  It is underdone and wicked.  The plate refuses to hold it.  My testimony is already padded thickly.  I have been given much, and surely God will require much, but I have nothing to show.  Paul claims that he is chief among sinners, but he and I will fight for the title, and I am confident in my own success.

I live by faith because I have nothing else to offer.  My belief must be counted as righteousness, for I am small.  By law shall no flesh be justified.  Dare I say that Christ's death was in vain?  I must live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.  This is the life I now live in the flesh.

Hills of rock and purple fringed bushes fly past me.  I am still as worlds pass by, this trip by daylight, splashed across a brief word in my history.  My smallness is surrounded.

Some people seem born into holiness, but I know my flesh, born into depravity.  How much has been forgiven me.  Joy rises out of this smallness.  God made flesh.  Immensity cloistered in human womb (Donne).  My life drops from the faucet onto an ocean of saints who whisper softly from pages breathed of Sovereignty.  "Endure for the joy set before you."  In the presence of God alone is fullness of joy.  Sin pushes me to my knees, to His presence, to His joy.

Oh, and doesn't joy fill my cup, my broken vessel, my humble clay.

It is raining now.  It will not stop until I reach my destination, but Christ is in it.  He is here in the rain.  Every drop fallen onto my windshield is a new wave of Grace.