Broken bottles

I really don’t like grace. Really friends, I’m just not a fan.

Now wait, before you call me crazy and X the page, let me explain. Grace and I have had a deeply complicated relationship in my thirty-something years of life. At best, I’ve reluctantly invited her to sit with me and at worst, I’ve fought like hell to burn the bridge that leads to her.

You see, it’s really not grace herself that I despise. It’s my need for it. And I’m guessing I’m not alone here. I’ve got red in my ledger. So much red. Like give a group of sugared up toddlers baseball bats and send them into a winery – that kind of red! It’s messy. It’s dangerous. And it stains everything and everyone within its reach.

But grace is here. Waiting. No strings attached. Yet so often in my life I have opted to sit in the heap of broken wine bottles. I can figure it out. It’s my mess, I can clean it up. I don’t need any help. I imagine even if my fairy godmother appeared and offered to reverse this disaster with the flick of her wand, I would still resist.

No thanks, fairy godmother, I’ve got this.

My friends, I literally don’t EVER “got this.” I’ve tried. For years, I have tried to clean up my own messes. I called it “independence” and “determination,” but really, it was simply pride. And lots of it. And this is why my relationship with grace has always made me deeply uncomfortable. In order to embrace grace, we have to embrace our need for it. It’s not simply a matter of admitting we need grace. I am willing to admit I am far from perfect. But am I willing to embrace it? Am I willing to hand over over the clean up? Yikes! Frankly, for most of my life the answer would have been a hard and fast NO. No one cleans up my mess, except me. I am perfectly capable of handling things myself.

Except that I’m not.

I’m not capable. I can’t superglue all of these wine bottles back together and somehow refill them with the wine that has soaked into deepest corners of my soul. I have spent decades desperately trying to prove to myself (and others) that I am strong enough to fix my imperfections— my sin. Yet every single one of my attempts land me right back in that pile of broken wine bottles.

I love what Romans 6:14 says, “For sin shall no longer be your master, because you are not under the law, but under grace.” Grace. We now live under grace.

My oldest loved being worn on my chest in the baby carrier. I mean, she loved it. She would drag the carrier over to me with her chunky baby arms and beg to be put in it. It didn’t matter where we were or what we were doing, she simply loved being strapped to my chest. I loved it too. I loved her being close to me. I especially loved it when we needed to run errands and the weather was cold and wet. I would strap her to my chest and throw on what was now an oversized maternity coat and bury her deeply under it. She was safe, dry and warm. Under there, she was secure and completely unscathed by what was happening outside of the coat.

As it is with our sweet Lord. His grace covers us. We are safe under there. Protected. Our sins are gone. Our ledger wiped clean. We are safe, loved and wholly forgiven. All we have to do is step under his grace and rest.