Grace

You hear about grace all the time in the Bible, especially in the New Testament. And, no, I'm not talking about what you say before meals. Different grace. God's grace: the unfathomable capacity of an unknowable entity to grant undeserved blessings… that kind of grace. Lots of "uns" there—simply because it's too big to comprehend.

Anyway, here's the really hard thing about grace... especially God's. You can't earn it. You can't seek it. Well, you can, but it seems that it's never where you look for it. It appears somewhere else. (I think God likes saying "Boo! Surprise!") One nice thing about grace is it keeps popping up in unexpected places, and so if you are on the lookout for it you may be able to recognize it.

Most of us don't understand the grace of God (I don't) for a couple of reasons: it isn't fair. We think we want life to be fair. We also want God to kill the other guy for us, punish him for his sins, but forgive us for ours. So when a good guy gets cancer we say "Hey! Not fair! God! You made a crummy world!" But, that same cancer could be an opportunity for extreme contact with God. What do we know? Diddly-squat.