Embracing Grace

What is my story? What is the theme of my life that makes everything make sense?

Every story has a plot, even the plotless ones. Every story has a goal, no matter how vague. Every story in every novel, notebook, poem, and prophecy is simply a character that wants something and overcomes conflict to get it.

What is my story?

It starts small. Infant small. Small as a small town in a small state that no one knows anything about except there’s rednecks and chickens and one president who plays the saxophone. Small as a small house with a small family, but big in love and high hopes and imagination and freedom.

Building a playhouse out of scraps. Playing in the mud while Mom weeds the garden. “Helping” Dad fix the car. Doing schoolwork at the dining room table and cleaning office buildings at night. Writing picture books. Field trips with friends. Singing in church. Envying the “big kids.” Crying over piano practice and math.

That’s the first chapter.

Since then my plot has had its ups and its downs, made drastic by high hopes and hormones. Difficult people, lonely isolation, getting outside the comfort zone, inspiring friends, quitting some things and starting others…all part of the process.

The theme emerges.

Through the secure love and beautiful blessings and the disappointments and the rocky spans, I begin to see a trend. Like a defiant red line jutting up above the graph, zigzagging but never changing color.

It’s something like grace.

Photo Credit: Palo