Overflowing

"He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good and sends his rain on the righteous and the unrighteous." - Matthew 5:45

The grace of God is everywhere and it has overtaken and consumed me. In the midst of both the ordinary and unusual pains of life, there is this joy that cannot be squelched. It is a joy that has become physical in that I feel this lightness in my chest as if my heart had wings and it is just floating around in my body, my ribs being the only thing preventing it from flying on out of here. And yet occasionally in moments of ecstasy it does escape, floating about the room and I'm forced in my mind's eye to run after it, leaping off the sofa to catch it before it becomes entangled in the ceiling fan. It is the strangest feeling, and one that has been growing in intensity over the last five years. I guess you could say that I am falling in love. God has grabbed a hold of me and I can't look away.

Life doesn't make any sense to me. I honestly can't figure it out. Part game whose rules I don't know, part random tragedy, part minor heartbreak, and all struggle from the first to the last. My perception, right or wrong, is that there are some people who have an innate knowledge of how "the game is played", some internal indicator that let's them know how to act or react in any given situation. Whether or not that is true, what is true is that I am not one of those people. I am at a complete loss as to how to move through this life with grace and effectiveness. The image that comes to mind when I think of my life and thus my relationship with God is of a rat in a flood swollen and raging river clinging to a log, scrambling, scrambling, claws extended trying deperately to keep from being ripped off and swept away.

At some point in the last five years, I finally started to get a grip on the log. The river, choked with debris and rapids is only getting worse, the bank further away, but amidst the terror, I have started to enjoy the journey. Perched precariously atop my log I have seen glimpses of beauty, perceived only from this vantage point that sustain me and give me strength for the ride.

The grace of God is the most beautiful thing in the universe and because of its beauty, it has the power to sustain and uphold. The most beautiful and powerful display of God's grace was Jesus birth, life, death and resurection. The beauty of Jesus, in principle and in reality is so powerful that it overflows and fills all of life. As I cling desperately to Christ amid the torrents of life, inwardly my soul is flooded with beauty until I find that the rat has begun to do an Irish jig atop his log, laughing and crying all at once as the waters rage.

I have never experienced a major tragedy in my life and so I'm not yet qualified to speak on that subject but I have found that throughout the minor aches and pains of life that Christ's love and grace has given me the power to move forward. His love has saved my soul, yes, but in the meantime his beauty is redeeming my life.

A red flower in the desert west of Phoenix just last week, a drop of water slowly running down the shower wall earlier this year, the rising sun exposing the flaws in a brick wall by casting a thousand tiny shadows across it's rusty red face shortly after 9/11, my daughters' two arms wrapped tight around my neck in a fierce growling hug (she doesn't hug so much as attack), the color green in a hundred hues as seen through my back door, a breeze weighted with the smell of cedar, a sip of wine, the ripple of muscle in a longhorn's side as he tries to shoo the flies away, and the trembling sound made by a guitar in that Eli Young song that took me took me far, far away. All of these and so many more are examples of the love and grace of God that overflows and spills everywhere; signposts pointing to his beauty, foretastes of the kingdom, hints of the not yet, sustenance and power for the now.

To look at me outwardly, you would not know this great symphony playing in my chest, nor would I probably suspect of you. I guess that is one of our great challenges, isn't it? How do we transfer inward realities into external momentum? The cry for help goes out again...Jeeesuuss!

"There is no event so commonplace but that God is present within it, always hiddenly, always leaving you room to recognize him or not to recognize him, but all the more fascinatingly because of that, all the more compellingly and hauntingly. In writing those lectures and the book they later turned into, it came to seem to me that if I were called upon to state in a few words the essence of everything I was trying to say both as a novelist and as a preacher, it would be something like this: listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace." - Frederick Buechner