I’ve just had another surgery to inject gel into my paralyzed vocal cord. This will give me another few good months of talking, but it’s also a test to see if the medication I’m taking will control my cough well enough for a permanent surgery to put an implant in the place of my disabled vocal cord. I can’t talk for five days, so I’ve been reading and writing more than usual. And thinking.
The hardest admonition I’ve had to accept lately is that I’ve not always extended the grace that has been extended to me. God’s mercy toward me has been bottomless and even extravagant. I’ve never had to earn it. He’s looked beyond my failings and selfishness and lavished His mercy on me. Over and over again.
I’ve lived much of my life with a “put on your big girl pants and keep moving” mentality. I’ve held myself to it, and at times not allowed myself room to be weak. I’ve just as frequently held others to it too, hoarding grace and meting it out in measly stipends only when others were deserving. But when something comes your way that no size pants can handle and no bootstraps can hold, grace becomes even more priceless. You realize that it is a gift so precious and so dear that your hands feel unworthy to hold it…but it’s got your name on it. To leave it would be a dishonor. To hoard it would be disrespectful. It’s a gift meant to be shared.
I just read some of the most profound statements I’ve heard in a long time. They resonated within the depths of me: “You never know the way of love without knowing the way of suffering…Every covenant to each other is ultimately a covenant to suffer with each other…the hellish roads are the ones that suffer from lovelessness” (Ann Voskamp). Let that hit deep.
We desperately need the love of God that He extends so selflessly and so completely, but we also need the love of our people. We need someone to hold our hand through the suffering. I’ve found that life isn’t about what we deserve at all. Life can’t be perfected. We all need grace, and not just that, we all need the person that extends it. We were designed that way by a loving God.
Nothing teaches this lesson more than children. I’ve been spending a lot of time in the nursery this last year. Back to the basics. Back where I started, in life and ministry. Those little ones and their simple lessons are powerful teachers. They love so simply and they call out so instinctively when they are in need of love. It’s as if we all start off there with an internal understanding of our need, but then somewhere along the way we think we need something more…we need to accomplish something, gain something, or arrive somewhere. But what we really need has always been right in front of us. It’s always been our God and our people, and too often our other pursuits rush us past both.
I’m trying not to rush these days. I’m trying to be fully where I am. My physical battle has helped me to see this with new eyes, but it’s also slowed me down. In that, this limitation has been an invitation to a greater measure of His grace. It’s made me more compassionate toward the suffering of others. It’s healing to extend grace to yourself and then to find more in yourself to extend to those around you. That’s what grace does