I’ve been thinking a lot recently about grace. The good grace when life is glorious and butterflies flutter in our tummies and everything is rainbows and sunshine. And then the hard grace when life isn’t so glorious. And the butterflies have long since left, leaving shells of cocoons behind, and the rainbow is hidden behind the clouds. It’s what Ann Voskamp calls the hard
eucharisteo. The kind of
eucharisteo grace that finds you in the middle of thinking “
No, God, we won’t take what You give. No, God, Your plans are a gutted, bleeding mess and I didn’t sign up for this and You really thought I’d go for this? No, God, this is ugly and this is a mess and can’t You get anything right and just haul all this pain out of here and I’ll take it from here, thanks. And God? Thanks for nothing.” And then choosing to say instead “
Oh, and God? You’re still beautiful.”
The saying is true – you don’t know what the tea bag holds until you put it in hot water. And you don’t know what your faith can take until it’s twisted in ways you didn’t think possible.
On Easter Sunday, I settled onto our window seat with my Bible, journal, and One Thousand Gifts – the book I’ve been slowly making my way through in recent weeks that I quoted in the paragraph above.
I had just done the newborn workshop a few days before, and began thinking about how posing a newborn is a lot like what God does with our faith. It’s really amazing how you can pose newborns into the bendiest positions. When you move them and lay them down, their faces crumple up and they begin to fuss. But if you hold them with a little bit of pressure, get in their ear shushing them, and rock them a little bit, they quickly settle down and sleep soundly in the new position they’ve been put in.
I couldn’t help but feel like that’s what God has been doing with my faith in the last year or two. He’s bending me and moving me into positions I don’t necessarily want to go into, knowing the end result is going to be beautiful. And if I just settle into it, trusting Him, He’ll work it all out for HIS glory. It might not be the result I expected or wanted. But I can count on the fact that it will be the one He had planned all along.
I’ve found myself recently having conversations I never thought I would be having. Facing the kind of adult things that I still feel too young to face. My faith bending into positions I never thought it could get into. But He knows the end result. And all I can do is settle into it and trust Him. Happy Friday.
SO CUTE!
Beautiful photo & your thoughts on Faith are just what I needed to read today! Thanks!