Grace Extends and Reaches, Even in the Darkest Winter

Some of you might remember a blog post I wrote about mean girls and hard times my daughter had when she was caught in the middle of a mess with some girls at school. It was horrible. It was also temporary.

Yesterday, Emma and I were driving to Safeway to meet her dad, and we shared a few minutes of a check-in. My kids are getting older and it’s getting hard and harder to talk about them on my blog. They need privacy, but I thought this worth sharing. She told me that when she was talking to a friend the other day, they were laughing about how everyone says 7th grade is the worst, and she laughed. “It’s not that bad, Mom. I like Middle School.”

I laughed with her and we smiled about how every year is unique. I suggested that perhaps her sixth grade is what other people experience in seventh grade, and she agreed. She remembers the lonely nights, the tears, the fear, the ache of transition – and she’s enjoying a season of rest.

When she got out of the car, I drove home and cried. Gratitude. Oh the gratitude that overwhelmed me. She’s okay. Sixth grade was indeed a very hard year. Moving countries, divorce, change on every damn side — and we were some tired people. I tucked them up so tight and prayed over them every single day. And begged God to help me, to help them, to bring relief.

Then I made the decision to move out to Carnation and get married. Geez. Talk about risk. But, here’s a secret I haven’t told many people. I spent hours and hours on my knees. I knew I’d found the real thing. John is good in all the ways a person can be good. As in, I knew that his kindness and purity and wholesome quirkiness was what my heart needed and I also knew that when something brings life to a mother…. over time, it brings life. Period.

So about those prayers… I walked and walked and prayed and prayed. I cried and raged and worried. I wondered what people would think of me. And some have thought really mean things and told them to me. (Which is okay, because they only know what they know. God’s grace extends … always, even to the overly opinionated and mean people. The rain falls on the good and the bad, of which I have most certainly been both.) Some friends have stayed silent. And some have gently blessed me on my way, and let me be a grown woman. Which speaks to people’s maturity. I so desperately want to be like the latter. I really want to be like the people who simply let people be themselves and extend grace, withhold judgement, and bless them wherever they find themselves — because we never know the whole story and God loves us. Always. All of us. God sees all the tears we cry in secret and catches them in jars and saves them. Poetry or not, the point is, God cares about the things no one knows anything about.

Anyways, October is nearing its end and the days are quickly ushering us into November. The nights are longer, the leaves are cascading down into billows on the damp earth. The autumn colors are so rich with their golden vibrance. It’s hard to imagine that the leaves are turning orange and gold as a sign of their death, that their season of bloom has come to its end. Yet, that is exactly what is happening. Soon, the leaves will be gone and the branches will stand bare in the world and all the life of the trees will be hidden and underground, in the roots, unseen by the onlooking eye. Such is our life with God.

Our lives with God go from seen to unseen, from public to private, from spring to summer, to fall and then into seasons of winter to prepare us for the next season of fruitful abundance. We transition into the season of winter, to let our roots go down deep, to let life be hidden and disclosed to the audience of One, in order to mature and grow stronger. The work of becoming sure and sturdy, strong and mature is never done under the watchful eye of a massive audience.

The trees and seasons teach us this.

There is so much crazy in the world right now. Elections are upon us. War and refugees are in the news feed. Poverty and powerlessness are everywhere. Fear haunts us at every corner. The Evangelical church, or maybe the Church in general is painfully divided, and lines are being drawn in the sand every day.

I have been a Christian now for most of my life. I knelt down in the grass and gave my heart to Jesus the summer I turned sixteen. Now, I am thirty-nine. I have lived in several parts of the world and have experienced poverty, rejection, abandonment, betrayal, and downright despair in many of those places. Some of these were from my own doing. Unmet expectations and disappointing outcomes can slay anyone. However, some of these experiences were not of my own doing. I was forced to respond to the circumstances I found myself in. This, for me, has been where my faith was most tested. 

I write all of this today with the hope of encouraging us. We are afraid of so many things. Some of us are afraid of the outcome on November 8, 2016. There are many reasons to be afraid. Some are afraid of poverty and the state of the church, or the state of the Union, or of the wars that threaten. Some of us are horribly disappointed with life and the way it seems to have unfolded, despite our best efforts to guide our own lives into a particular direction. We have so many reasons to fear and tremble on this earth.

I find strength and hope in the invitation to be a part of a quiet and sure faith. A faith that is available to all who would desire it, a faith where race and gender and class and life-choices do not exclude one from it, but simply welcome and invite. It’s a faith that beckons us to come, to sit and dine for all eternity. It is a faith that clarifies one’s value and worth as having nothing to do with one’s efforts or successes or failures … It’s a faith that simply says … “Come all who are weary … And I will give you rest.” Or in another place, “Come all who are thirsty, and drink.”

In times of winter, the trees rest. Their roots go deep into the ground. Things appear stark and bare, cold and lifeless. Here we learn that life is not found in the external. Life is always discovered in the hidden places, alone and in the quiet.

When the heat comes, and the earth rages, and the nations cry out in uproar, and all seems lost … We are invited to feast on the abundance of riches that are available to all, but are most frequently found among the lowly and humble of heart.   

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