Each day during Lent, I’ve been intentional about paying
attention to moments of grace in each day. When I find one, I take a moment to
say, “Aha! That’s just the right amount of grace to get me through this day.”
(Check out 2nd Corinthians 12:9, “My grace is a sufficient for you. . . “)
Yesterday was a challenge, as I encountered two people who
provided the opposite of grace. (Neither encounter, by the way, was with a person
in my church.) One person had been very hurt and wounded by an event with
someone else which, in reality, did not happen in the way in which they thought
they had. Their hurt was real, but the event itself was not. No amount of
explanation could help them see that what they thought was reality wasn’t, and
I realized they were too invested in their hurt feelings to be able to accept
the truth.
The other encounter was later in the day, related to this
political thing that I’m doing. Someone sought me out to sit next to me at a
meeting, only to spend the meeting whispering unkind things to me. His parting
shot when I was finally able to leave was to call me “kiddo;” not in the “hey,
we’re just pals” sense of the word, but in the denigrating “your little mind
certainly can’t comprehend the big things we’ve been talking about” sense of
the word. I almost responded with, “Hey, buddy, that’s ‘Reverend Doctor Kiddo’
to you,” but discretion prevailed and I left.
Sheesh. Some days, and people, are like that.
In the middle of these grace-less events, I went on Facebook
for my once daily check-in. (Another Lenten discipline is to do Facebook only
once daily. I’ve missed some posts, I’m sure, but I feel a lot freer from the
obsessive checking on who’s doing what, and who’s liking what I’m doing.) While
on Facebook, I saw a campaign by one of our teachers in the public schools.
Jaime Guthrie is seeking reading books for kids in her class who are reading at
below grade level. Since they’re below grade level, her standard classroom books
are not at the right level. (Go to DonorsChoose.org and look for her classroom
for more info or to donate.) And I remembered the honorarium I had received for
doing a funeral recently, and I remembered the man, Harry Helgason, and how
much he loved children.
On the spur of the moment, I donated that honorarium to that
project. Now, children will have books to read, and Harry’s family will receive
classroom thank you notes for this gift in his memory. It makes me smile to
think about it, and I hope it makes them smile when they hear about it.
It was just the right amount of grace to get me through the
day.
Every other day during Lent, I’ve been watching for the
grace done to me. Yesterday, I discovered that the grace sufficient for the day
might sometimes come from me instead of being done to me. It doesn’t matter the
source of the grace. Grace is always grace, and it’s always enough.
