Twists of Grace

With age comes; grey hairs, knowing the back store places to buy real Olive Oil, and a bit of wisdom…if one is lucky.

I am constantly amazed at the providential prosperities afforded to me in life as my theological roots don’t support that concept. Being brought up MS Lutheran, there was always this deep seated fear that a flaming pitchfork would come hurling down from the heavens at any given moment I was doing, (or even thinking), something less than godly.

Actually I don’t think that message came from my dad in the pulpit, but rather from my mother. I remember her telling me some friends invited them to a nightclub dinner back in the 1960’s. No one knew it was a topless review. She said she was sweating bullets and praying without ceasing during the entire performance that God would not choose that particular moment to announce Judgment Day. The supreme ‘gotcha’ moment as she knew that meant she would go to straight to hell. I asked her if she didn’t think God would cut her a little slack under the circumstances She said she hoped that He would, but I could see she wasn’t 100% sure.

Therefore, you can see why as a child I went through a stage of believing God was like Santa Claus: If you are a good person and you get all the goodies, you are a bad person, God firestorms your days with burning coals. It didn’t take long to see the fallacy in that concept as I progressed through adolescence. The fact I was still standing at age 20 seemed to me a miracle.

Grace is an easy concept and yet one that has baffled the masses for millenniums. You deserve to be ridiculed, ransacked, and abandoned, but instead you get treated like a princess, covered in kisses, and given a working model of Aladdin’s lamp thrown in for good measure.

Grace however is not an obvious turn of events all the time – and that’s the caveat. I swear God has a crafty sense of humor some times – just to see if we are awake paying attention. Times like when life dishes out some real doozies and we feel like we are getting our ‘just rewards’.

It's natural at these times to panic. And in my case, it was usually reacting with extreme drama.That where this grey hair and wisdom comes into play - save the need for Olive oil at this point..I learned after a few decades of riding the roller-coaster from hell to just sit back for a while, hold back the wailing and gnashing of teeth, and see how things get played out. More than once the story had a remarkable twist I never saw coming.

A Grace twist.Case in point: It’s an ancient story of a farmer and his horse.

“One day his horse runs away. And his neighbor comes over and says, to commiserate, “I’m so sorry about your horse.” And the farmer says “Who Knows What’s Good or Bad?”

The neighbor is confused because this is clearly terrible.The horse is the most valuable thing he owns.But the horse comes back the next day and he brings with him 12 feral horses. The neighbor comes back over to celebrate, “Congratulations on your great fortune!” And the farmer replies again: “Who Knows What’s Good or Bad

And the next day the farmer’s son is taming one of the wild horses and he’s thrown and breaks his leg. The neighbor comes back over, “I’m so sorry about your son.” The farmer repeats:“Who Knows What’s Good or Bad?”

Sure enough, the next day the army comes through their village and is conscripting able-bodied young men to go and fight in war, but the son is spared because of his broken leg.”

A few weeks ago we had a few moments of High Drama. I mean the spectacular kind of a ‘hidden traumatic turn of events where one is unconsciously influenced by the emotions and behaviors of others through attack by an unsuspecting blind victim’ kind of High Drama. Things were defiantly not going according to plan.

Remembering that panic had few benefits, we regrouped, cut bait, took an alternate route than what was originally planned, and headed off in a totally new unsuspected direction which has turned out to be an incredible road of blessing and promise. Who knew?

Grace. Don’t fret my friends. You never know. “Maybe, sometimes, in the midst of things going terribly wrong, something is going just right.” ― Gerald G. May, The Dark Night of the Soul





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