Grace is hunting me down
As I was sitting here eating a pickle, yes you heard me right, I decided to finally attempt to write about some things that I’ve been thinking about, learning, and experiencing lately. It’s kind of a frustrating paradox because I wish that I could take you, put you in my soul, and swish you around for a little bit so that you could exhaustively understand my thoughts and heart, but I can’t. The paradoxical side of this is that the more I think about it, the more I realize that it’s not all that important because maybe it’s just something I needed to learn, and it won’t hold much relevance or importance to anyone else. But alas..that’s what community’s for, isn’t it?
And hithero….let’s continue. Actually let’s get serious.
Allow me to introduce you to the word that has been slowly drowning me in itself for the last 8 months: Grace.
The reality of grace has been hounding me and pursuing me, at times with dangerous and painfully humbling vehemence. I’ve found myself trying to capture it and manipulate it, but it continues to rip down walls I’m quickly trying to rebuild, shoveling mortar in as fast as my slimy hands can manage. Gosh, even as I’m writing this, it is pricking me in the side, reminding me of its overwhelming beauty that makes me so uncomfortable.
I have so many things to say, it’s hard for me to focus in order to write something coherent enough to make a point, and short enough to keep whoever reads this interested.
I want to encourage you. If you’re reading this right now and think that you’ve pretty much got the reality and meaning of grace down (this used to be me), and think it basically sums up the fact that in Christian theology we can have eternal life if we simply ”ask Jesus into our hearts,” I would press you to look further into it. It could just be me (I suffer from the ugly, perpetual, ever-present struggle of pride disguising itself as humility in my life), but this dang hunter named “Grace” that I was telling you about…is everywhere….begging for you to see it and listen…and for your soul to step back slowly in reverance and mutter a quiet and soft, “oh.”
When I was in California recently, I was sitting at Starbucks reading Philip Yancey’s, Reaching for the Invisible God. Mr. Yancey was making a great point, as usual, about the world aching for and also hating God and truth and the struggles and doubts that honestly come with a wrestling desire to know Him, and I sat back in my chair to ponder. I looked outside at the Southern Cal studs and students wandering near the campus and my focus shifted to my caramel macchiato cup, and I caught a glimpse of the word “God.”
Grace had followed me into Starbucks and had sat down across from me to talk.
“It’s tragic that extremists co-opt the notion of God, and that hipsters and artists reject spirituality out of hand. I don’t have a fixed idea of God. But I feel that it’s us - the messed up, the half-crazy, the burning, the questing - that need God, a lot more than the goody-two-shoes do.”
Grace had cleverly, and trendily I might add, disguised itself as a musician named Mike Doughty who happened to get a quote on a Starbucks paper cup soon to be disposed of. This quote might seem simplistic, and maybe you’re getting into the mindset of, “Okay, Jodi’s about to stumble upon that line of thinking which I already know…that realization that maybe God isn’t in a box and might be a little more than she thought.” (It’s funny that I just got offended about you thinking a hypothetical thought about me that I just made up about myself.)
That is just the beginning.
I’m finding a lack of grace. In me. In the world. In everyone. In those who follow Jesus. It’s human, I know. But, you see…here’s the problem. I’m a dreamer of sorts, I like to believe in revolutions and moments of shining glory. So, you’re going to have to deal with that uncomfortable characteristic of mine.
Grace is strikingly absent in my life. I realize it more and more and more. I’ll be honest with you. Some days (this is true), I actually have a hard time when I try to analyze ways that I have sinned that day….No, I’m not kidding. This is the ridiculous absurdity of the nature of my heart. I know that I was kind of selfish and probably jealous here and there, but its hard for me to see the actual situation of my heart and its idols. This is because I don’t understand that incomprehensible reality of grace. That word even sounds wimpy because of what we’ve watered it down to. This is a crazy, crazy concept, and it brings with it some disgusting prerequisites. We have to wallow in the depths to understand the contrasting glory of its opposite.
Let me leave off here with a story about a few weeks ago, and then I will write more later, in order to not lose my audience of 10,000 people.
I was in Arizona when I heard a story about a man from the Middle East. This man was born into a family of shepherds. His father left his mother six months before he was born, and his 13 year old brother died of cancer a few months later. His mother tried to kill herself while still carrying him, but somehow survived. He was harshly treated as he was growing up, and made some pretty serious choices in his life that have led to his currently being sentenced to death by hanging. His name is Saddam. Perhaps you’ve heard of him. I heard about his death sentence, and listened as everyone around me began to talk about him and him getting his “just reward.” My head and thoughts went along with the line of thinking, agreeing, and trying to imagine what those who were oppressed under his rule must be feeling. Obviously the man deserves death for the horrifying things he has done…
“Death by hanging, yes.” I thought. I imagined people rejoicing in the streets as we drove through Phoenix and I looked out the window. Then, someone in the car said that he had instead requested a firing squad, but that they had turned him down, and thankfully so, because “he deserves a drawn out and painful death.” Mmmhmm…I thought again. Definitely. “That’s too easy for him and what he’s done.” “He’ll have eternity in hell to pay for it and that reality.”
…I’m almost hesitant to mention my next thoughts because I basically have no right to even consider what he does or does not deserve. I have never lived in Iraq. I’ve never seen someone I love dragged away, tortured, or murdered in front of me. I’ve never lived a day in true fear for my life. I just want to make one point, though.
Something moved in my heart in the midst of all this thinking that shook me. I felt, truly, that God was moving in my spirit at that exact moment, to pray for Saddam Hussein. This wasn’t a sissy prayer, and this wasn’t a prayer of passivity. This wasn’t a happy prayer, nor a prayer of exoneration. This was God, reaching in and snapping my thoughts in half for approximately 3 minutes in order to pierce me with His reality of grace. “Pray for Saddam to realize the truth of the Gospel? For His redemption unto you? What?? He doesn’t deserve it. He deserves absolute pain, death, and separation from You FOREVER.”
And that’s when God pushed the lessons He’s been teaching me these last months into a part of me I didn’t like until I whimpered under the pressure. Do I deserve a death like that? Ugh….my workings haven’t had the intense and horrifying consequences that Saddam’s have, I haven’t killed anyone nor condemned people to their death.
But that’s where this Jesus character comes in to mess up my life. That’s where the Sermon on the Mount and Jesus’ radical lifestyle make me uncomfortable. He radically throws my rationale out of the way until it disappears into nothingness. Have I condemned, lusted after, murdered, criticized, and broken people in my mind? Hmm…yes I have. Is this a common occurence for me? Yes, Lord, it is. In fact a few nights ago I was so angry about something until He finally broke through my emotions to show me that it was because I was lacking one thing. And that thing popped into my room, so close to my face I couldn’t see anything else. Grace. I suddenly realized I was full of selfishness and dissension.
And then two sentences came blaring into my head.
“There are six things the Lord hates- no, seven things He detests:…hands that kill the innocent…a person who sows discord among brothers.”
And,
“Against You, and You alone, O Lord, have I sinned.”
Did you just get uncomfortable? I did. Again. It messes with you, this grace.
My very sin, something I had rationalized as incredibly small and normal, was listed right there among Saddam’s “hands that kill the innocent.” In fact, my sin was the one that Paul emphasized as the “seventh thing” that God hates.
Could it be that I need grace as much as Saddam Hussein does? Is it true that others could rightly (by God’s standards) be saying, “Yeah…Jodi deserves the longest, most painful death there is, and she’ll have eternity in hell to pay for it”…?? And I mean, truly, not in an abstract far-from-feeling-it way, but in a pierced and paralyzed for a few minutes with that reality way…
Grace is rushing into the world, screaming in silence to make itself known, and to free the world’s captives…
If you like Ray LaMontagne, you need to listen to