There is nothing free except the Grace of God.
My ideas on grace
Grace seems to be something that people sometimes struggle to understand. It is almost as if they do not know what grace really is or what it means. “Grace defies reason and logic,” Bono says. Bono is basically saying that when there are situations with no reason, grace gives us ideas of what the logic behind the situation could be. An example of grace in its works would be forgiving someone for things that you would not usually forgive them for. Whether it is forgiving someone for them being rude to you or lying, or even just doing you wrong and hurting you. Once you forgive them and see things get better between you, you can see what grace can do. It is having an open heart that makes grace so succesful and helpful in so many peoples lives. Just being able to swallow your grudges and the past is something special and it will help you in the future as God will bless you because of the grace that you have shown to others.
And grace is not hard to obtain. I have personally talked to family about religion and most all of them say that they do not want to start becoming a christian or just religious in general because of the things that they have done wrong in their life. In his book True Grit, Charles Portis states, “You must pay for everything in this world one way and another. There is nothing free except the Grace of God. You cannot earn that or deserve it.” The Grace of God is given to everyone because of the unconditional love that God has for us.
I have never heard this quote from Portis, nor have I ever thought that way, but now that it has crossed my mind and I have read it, I don’t think it will ever leave me and I plan to use it in order to get my family a little more into religion — as religion comes up at Thanksgiving almost every year — rather than to just push it off because they don’t think that God will forgive them. And just like Eugene H. Peterson says in his book The Contemplative Pastor: Returning to the Art of Spiritual Direction, “[m]y job is not to solve people’s problems or make them happy, but to help them see the grace operating in their lives.” I hope to help my family see grace and how it is in everyones life no matter what.
A conclusion that I have come to after reading Blue Like Jazz and some of these quotes is that the Grace of God is something special that a lot of the people I know, including myself at times, take for granted. There is the idea in peoples mind that people will never forgive you for some of the things that you have done to them, no matter how many times you say sorry. They will not budge. God is not that way. He loves every single one of us unconditionally and will always find room in his heart for forgiveness of you and to help guide you in the right direction. This is also something that puzzles me. How does he have it in him to accept the bad things that we have done and just throw them to the past? I have done some terrible things, in my eyes at least, and he continues to forgive me day after day and I feel that. I now know that his grace will always be there and the forgiveness will always be there as well. Now people here on earth just need to find that grace within themselves and maybe this world will brighten up a little rather than being so evil.
I think the most important thing about grace though, is that you must believe in grace and want grace in your life for it to really be there. Yes, it is there from the start, but for it to really work and work in your favor, you must believe and embrace it. You almost want to treat is a dream you want to pursue. If your dream is to become the best surgeon to ever walk the planet, do you think that will come to you over night? Or that you will be able to just go through the motions to achieve that goal? No, obviously. You need to work hard in school and in your training to become that great. That desire to achieve goals works in the same way as the desire to have grace within you and to recieve grace. Grace is something special that we should all take a step back and think about, and maybe realize how lucky we are to be able to obtain it for the cost of nothing.
