It's like when I would get home from a 4 hour long art class and want to get out my sketch pad as soon as I returned.
Tonight, I have the urge to understand grace.
To soak in it.
To spill it out.
To pick it up again.
To (honestly) question it.
To at least try and understand it.
To hold it in my hand for a split second and investigate...and study it.
Tonight I got dinner with a good friend. After I left I was prompted to think, 'Why does she care about me?'
As I walked back to my car, for some reason I kept asking myself why? What motivates us to care? Coffee dates here, e-mails there, but why?
It's really an incredible thing when you take a second and count the amount of people that have asked you how your day was. Or the amount of times a friend remembered a seemingly meaningless detail in a story you told a month ago.
I'm convinced these things come into play because of Grace...most importantly matter because of Grace.
I like to think about heaven.
A lot.
And that ultimately, Heaven will exist in a retrospect kind of way. It will undo the bad that has happened in life on earth...reaching back to our heartache on Earth and actively playing out and showing us how it was meant to be. I'm not asking for a theological debate here, but if I were God, who made something extremely beautiful like the Earth and everything within it, and some hairy bags of water (that's us) pretty much came a long and ruined it...the first thing I would want to do when they returned home would be to walk with them and show them how beautiful everything was meant to be. Not just the landscape without pollution, or the animals without cages...but everything.
That God would show us how every relationship that went wrong on Earth was meant to play out and ultimately bring us closer to Him. Or every idea that was grand and excellent on Earth that encompassed so much good but that we couldn't carry out...eventually carried out in Heaven...dislplaying exactly why we thought it was good in the first place.
For me, that idea of Heaven means a lot.
I'm only 22 years old and have seen a lot of heartache the world holds.
Divorce.
Deceitful men.
Deceitful women.
Women selling their bodies.
High school kids literally dying to find something worth living for.
While reaching into our Earthly life, I believe Heaven will somewhat resemble a perfect functioning organism. It won't just lay there, it will work. It will function. It will move. It will grow and it will be efficient...incredibly efficient....everything done and carried out will be worth it.
Within Heaven, we will still have to work through things, figure things out, but within this process, I believe that God's perfection and pure righteousness is sowed, allowing us to reap with Him all of the glory at the end of our toil.
THIS, I believe is grace.
Where you have done nothing yet reap everything...and what you reap is incredibly good.
I don't like the idea of seeing Grace as it being something offered and then because of that vision, displaying it onward toward others....I like that idea that whatever you offer towards others...no matter what it was brought on by.... somehow it turns out worthy.
Like a question to a friend about their day...
You didn't ask because of Grace, it was made meaningful because of Grace.
Actively working through you was this idea that that question 'How was your day?' was always meant to carry real, honest, genuineness, and when what was intended is carried out....THAT is when you see and experience Grace.
Once you begin to understand that Grace is not what motivates you, but instead is what makes what you do worth it...
You begin to ask more and more of those questions....
"How was your day?"
"How are you?"
When you are not merely motivated to just ask, you begin to look forward to the outcome...you desire the same significance those questions, or things, or relationships were created for in the first place.
Grace at least for me, is not what gets me out of bed in the morning....instead, its what helps me go to sleep at night...knowing that in some retrospective, functioning, incredible, mystifying way, what I did was worthy that day....when it really shouldn't have been.
Incredible this thing, Grace.
Absolutely mystifying.
....along with His peace, God's Grace does transcend ALL understanding...
