We Stand There By Grace

There are a million times in my short life that in hindsight I see what could've been, maybe even what should've been, but what wasn't. Some of us look back and we see what was and how God plucked our feet clean out of the mud and set us on a rock. Many of us have forgotten all of that.

Wherever we stand we stand there by grace.

I'm a passionate person and I've got strong opinions about nearly everything. I imagine that most of us do. We have an innate desire to be known and heard and I get that. There are things in our world that are going on that are so heartbreaking and horrific that they beg to be spoken out, shouted out against.

I worry though that some of us are shouting out without looking behind, or in, or better yet, up.

A quick scroll through facebook or twitter can often make my blood boil. As another blogger put it recently, "If you are not kind on the internet, you are not kind". I would take it a step further and say if you are not kind on the internet or to those who are different than you then you don't understand grace. Period. I'm beginning to think I barely understand the marvelousness of grace.

Take any hot button issue and put "I would never..." in front of it and you have a person who has forgotten how God, in Christ, plumbed the depths of sin to rescue. Maybe you have lived a grace covered life and have done it all "right" or have shaken your head at stories' about mamas who saw no other option and made a choice you deem as "selfish".

I have shaken my head along with you, but God also has brought me face to face with women, not unlike me, whose lives are my could've beens. Those women have humbled me down to the holy ground that is God's grace.  I don't claim to understand the mystery which is why my life is different than another person's life.

All I know is that God's grace poured out through Jesus' blood is the great equalizer. 

If I believe that He reached deep for that abortive mother or willing sex worker or pedophile or suicide bomber or...name your ugly sin, then I have to believe He reached that deep for me. I'm not different. Given the right circumstance, the right configuration of my life, you could find me there in those dark places, desperate, alone and horribly lost.

Our's is a try hard, do good, show your trophies kind of world where we leave little room for those we deem undeserving. Christians are just as susceptible to this thinking and we often use the internet to flash our trophies of moral superiority.  It would do us great good to see ourselves as the undeserving. I desperately need to see myself as undeserving.

I believe facebook would grow a bit silent with such thinking.

Grace is the biggest kind of brave and maybe the marginalized could come out into the light if we would be courageous enough to see that we haven't earned one bit of our life. Grace erases the margins until all that is there are people who need, desperately, Jesus who rescues us all from the same depth.

We need to speak loudly in our world about the way sin has broken us and keeps shattering people and places over and over again. Planes fall from skies, waves break banks and flood homes, children are stolen and disappear, girls are enslaved to brothels where they are used and thrown away used and thrown away, families' starve, there is not enough and this world is sick and bleeding out and the grace drenched need to speak truth and love over the wounds, but we can't do it from a place of self-righteousness.

We can only speak from a place of Christ-righteousness. 

No trophies of our own held high, only Christ dead, buried, and gloriously, victoriously alive and searching for all who are lost. Even me. Even you. He dares to save us all.