Devotion 397 - grace

We walk in and descend the stairs and for at least one hour, my kids are in heaven. I realize each and every time that this is what good moms do.

They take their kids to the library.

There is absolutely nothing I do not love about the library.  I love that all children, even mine have to be quiet.  I love the fact that everything or almost everything about the library is free.

I love the wild assortment of books and movies. I love that I feel like a better mom and a better person for having been to the library.  I love that almost every time we go to the library my husband tells the story of not having a library when he was a little boy. An avid reader as a child, my husband had to rely on a postal library. My children respond with all the sympathy their hearts can hold and I believe they treasure our little library even more.

I believe our library loves us back.  Some time ago, they put in computer screens and scanners that allow novices like me and my six-year old to check out our own books.  Even more fabulous is the fact that the computer prints our sometimes very long list of books that we are borrowing.  For me, this is equivalent to our “Get out of Jail Free” card.  We magnetize it to our refrigerator and when it’s time to return books, we have a guide to what is due.  I love this.

Once in a great while, without my knowledge, my children and my husband will make a solo trip to the library.  Somehow they ignore our “Get out of Jail Free” card and return whatever is at their fingertips.  Their appetite for new books somehow trumps their responsibility to the old.  

Fortunately and again, because I believe our library dearly loves me,  the library sends an email and announces what it is we have forgotten to return.

Typically it is something to do with Disney princesses.  My little daughter and I will search her little book shelf, her book basket and like the other evening, we dug under her bed.  I retrieved the dusty Disney princesses to the applause of my six-year old.  Missing stuff is never welcome, finding is treasure.

I thought about this long and hard as I listened to my husband share the anniversary of a particularly difficult time in his life.

Strange how memories work.  Sometimes smells awaken them, sometimes sites, sometimes sounds or voices and sometimes dates.  But some, perhaps particularly painful ones get packed away like an old leather valise.  We know it is bursting with memories yet its lock remands it silent and perhaps that is how our minds prefer it.

But then that trigger, that calendar, or that story, that whisper of things past and the valise is suddenly open and our minds scurry to make room for the new found emotions that accompany the wonder or the wounds of things long since packed away.

Minds are masterpieces.  They are God’s way of organizing thoughts and memories, victories and sorrows as if in a library.  Shelves seem to go unilaterally forward until something or someone take us back.

We fight the reversal because we are forward thinking people.  What is happening tomorrow is the agenda, certainly yesterday is both absent and unimportant.

That is until the memories are found and even in their pain or frustration or embarrassment or loss they have somehow uncovered grace.

Grace is something I don’t think I will ever understand and thus I am confident I miss it.  I run through the memory, the could-haves, the almosts, the whatifs and realize the Father rained down grace not only in the moment but in the keeping of the memory.

I sit at a funeral and see someone I knew some three decades ago. The memories of hopes, dreams and joys seep in.  It was not just the girlfriend I saw, but the young me standing next to her.  How I wish I could write to me, young silly me and tell her about grace.

I had no idea.  You see God is on a relentless, passionate pursuit of us. I want to tell that twenty-something me that.

I remember how random life felt. How I felt fearless and scared all in the exact same moment.  How I had seemingly no direction yet dreams larger than life itself. He knew.

He knew the life I would need, the man I would want, the illness I would see, the places I would go, the career He would design. He knew He would place two of my children around the world and friends as close as my arms could reach.

Time flies by and grace is missed.  I want to tell her that.  I want to tell her it will all be okay, that the God that called Zacchaeus down from a tree when she was six-years old still calls us.  That He is good, not just in joy but in abject suffering and loss and that underneath it all there is this crazy abundant life full of grace.

In the hurry up pace of life, I pass it by.  I forget I have access to Him in the simple sweet mention of His name.  That even when I don’t see Him or feel Him or sense Him or hear Him, He is there and the life He has planned and purposed is far bigger than the dreams I have dreamt.

It is grace… all beautiful, bountiful grace.

Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God.  Romans 5: 1-2