grace--are you good at it?

Are you good at grace?  Does it pour from you effortlessly?  Are you always satisfied with your responses to life...to your loved ones...to strangers?

I've seen grace pour readily from past and present sufferers--wrought from their intense suffering.  These sojourners are intimately acquainted with that low down feeling.......with powerlessness and emptiness.  When you're low down yourself, instead of giving advice, they just hold your hand...not assuming they could've done it better than you....or that mistakes brought your suffering.

I want to be like this--to acquire such gentleness--but I'm fearful of the intense suffering it entails.

Lord, may grace pour readily from me.  Help me be the face of Christ to those around me.  I haven't suffered cancer or the death of a living child I've held and nurtured and laughed with.  I haven't been betrayed.  I'm not a widow.  My kids don't have terminable diseases.  I am not starving or cold.

But I want to be grace-filled, grace-full.  May it be so, Lord.

I love this excerpt from Ann's book, One Thousand Gifts, A Dare to Live More Fully Right Where you Are (Ann Morton Voskamp, 2010, pp. 96-97)

     I awaken to the strange truth that all new life comes out of the dark places, and hasn't it always been?  Out of darkness, God spoke forth the teeming life.  That wheat round and ripe across all these fields, they swelled as hope embryos in womb of the black earth.  Out of the dark, tender life unfurled.  Out of my own inner pitch, six human beings emerged, new life, wet and fresh.
     All new life labors out of the very bowels of darkness.
     That fullest life itself dawns from nothing but Calvary darkness and tomb--cave black into the radiance of Easter morning.
     Out of the darkness of the cross, the world transfigures into new life.  And there is no other way.
     Then...yes:  It is dark suffering's umbilical cord that alone can untether new life.
     It is suffering that has the realest possibility to bear down and deliver grace.
And grace that chooses to bear the cross of suffering overcomes that suffering.

My favorite line:  "It is suffering that has the realest possibility to bear down and deliver grace."

We can't argue with that.  That's truth.


Lord, may we welcome suffering, and not fear it.  May we know the beauty birthed from it.