I feel like the velveteen rabbit these days: stuffing falling out of me, my buttonhole eyes torn out, and my velveteen fur all rubbed away. Real is what I think this is called. But it does not always feel so ‘nice.’
I have days where I find believing in God and living close to Jesus next to impossible; days when everything feels like a faithless daze. But it is days like this that the experience and expression of divine grace becomes the most real…as the Scriptures say “when I am weak then I am strong.” For me that means when I am at the end of my rope, God makes up the shortcomings.
“Lord, I believe, but help me where my faith falls short.”
My spirituality these days is velveteen; ragamuffin grace in action. Something inside me, mostly cerebral, tells me God loves me in these moments – these moments when loving myself much less others is near impossible. That is when I need the Spirit reminding me that God will just love the stuffing right out of us, button holes and all. God’s love will reach down into the wreckage of our lives and pull us right out of the proverbial crapper, placing us into the divine warmth of a blanket called grace. And this all occurs usually when I think I cannot handle another thing or in the so-called ‘Eleventh Hour.’
(self pep talk here) Make no mistake about it, grace comes, sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, but come it does. Grace comes in the gutters and in the guttural.
Grace is the moment when all the stuffing has been pulled out, when the dangling button formerly known as an eye finally breaks from the last fraying thread and the word comes to us, “I love you truly, madly and deeply.” Grace is God in flesh, pitching his tent among us, saying he is for us even when all else and all others fail us.
Grace comes, child, oh yes it does!
God’s grace is that surreal power that changes the imperfect into the “I’m perfect” thereby making all else perfect as well. And as we stand at the precipice of a time when resurrection is celebrated all around us this weekend, and all we feel is dead, know that this moment – this precise moment – is the Perfect Moment of Grace.
soulpatch.net 