Grace
Ordinary love - is there such a thing? Don’t you see love as extraordinary? Isn’t it astounding and beautiful that we are powerfully drawn to certain people and filled with great affection for them? Think back to the days when you were falling in love with your spouse or the overpowering emotion you felt welling up within you when the nurse handed you your newborn baby. Those moments are anything but ordinary. Think of all that we do on an average day to demonstrate our love for one another.
Men, maybe you get up early in the still-dark morning to shower and head off to work or finish a long day of delivering packages and head straight to your son’s basketball practice still wearing your uniform. Women, maybe you stay up late decorating a birthday cake to make it just right or jump over puddles in the parking lot of the grocery store as you run out to your mini van in the pouring rain with your cart of food to bring home.
Kids, think of all the pictures you have drawn and flowers you have picked to give to your parents to try to express to them how much you appreciate them. Perhaps these countless and varied ways of daily showing love to our family members reflects a tiny part of what God’s love for us looks like and how we can experience His grace.
Did He have to paint that breathtakingly glorious sunset in the sky over the lake? Did we deserve to book a vacation to the green hills of Ireland to celebrate a special anniversary? These extravagant and yes, a little bit extra beyond the ordinary types of hurrahs in our lives can allow us a glimpse of that precious and incredible gift that God bestows upon us called grace. But there’s more…
What exactly is grace? Grace can be defined as unmerited freely given favor, love, and kindness given by God to humanity. The most beautiful part of that definition to me as a human is the word unmerited. I didn’t earn it, I don’t deserve it, and I couldn’t possibly pay for it. It’s beyond my means; it’s more than I could ever dream of having even if I gave everything I had to take ownership of it. And God sometimes lavishes it upon me at certain times in my life like a waterfall that cleanses and purifies and overwhelms me.
How else do I experience it? As Tish Harrison Warren explains in this chapter, ordinary love is the currency of God’s grace in our daily life (79). Not only are there the large and beautifully meaningful moments of weddings, baptisms, or funerals when we can get a sense of God’s love and the interweaving of our love for one another that supports us and holds us up in those events, but there are also the everyday occurrences that demonstrate the never-ending, reckless love of God in its quieter flows into our days.
We can be confident of this constant current each time our spouse looks our way and winks affectionately at us or our daughter sidles up and affectionately lays her head on our shoulder… in the murmured “I love you” from our adolescent son as he heads up to bed… God’s love comes to us in the little individual raindrops pattering on our head as well as the waterfall experience.
Praise God today for all of the ways that you have experienced his grace and love expressed through His creation and the fellow human creatures He has put into your life!
