Grace: Why I Need So Much

Because I seem to scratch and scrape for grace, for Him, hands dirt-dry from digging in it, nails caked with desperate need, sometimes just to feel anything at all, this minute when called upon to express my thoughts about grace it comes hard. In fact I feel like a hard-scrabble farmer, owner of thin-soiled, surface rock land and not a lot of it.

It's not supposed to be this way and so I know its me, not Him. He is a God of abundance, the God of overflowing cup and bread that spreads out bountiful so every last one is filled. To the scriptures, O woman, and to the knees. Plead the cause of the needy. There is plenty to go around, but fill those first in line who are hungriest: we must ask, seek, knock. Charles Spurgeon on prayer wrote we need new revelation of Christ often. Today, this minute, I do.

I'm in gospel of John, 16th chapter. Hearts are breaking heavy because He has spoken plain His going away plans. Later the scriptures show these disciples sleeping, for sorrow. The long aching, agonizing night is just around the bend in the garden but Jesus keeps His focus on the outcome, joy that outcomes come morning. He compares this sorrow to Woman in pangs of childbirth, her bringing forth in sorrow (pain: it hurts and it shocks the body to squeeze out a baby: bringing forth pries apart bones, and sometime tears flesh) but joy follows when a man child (or girl child) is born into the world. The agony Jesus faces, submits to, endures, the weight of sin that crushes out life, will itself give way to the weight of the cross and victory. The dagger of the cross strikes sin right in its vitals, where it lives so deep inside a person would think nothing could reach it, much less strike it a deadly blow. But for those who believe, whatever is placed under the power of that cross and His blood becomes grace.

For one who lived long barren of graces I find it better than sliced bread-with butter. In fact grace to me is a big slice of heaven. I was in the C word. Cult. No grace. Well. Smidgeons doled out doubtfully. While Jesus stood knocking plainly, rap soundings were muffled by the veil: faint and faraway to my ears.