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Grace

             May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. (II Corinthians 13:14)

What is my/your life supposed to look like? That was the question as I walked this morning. I am absolutely sure that mine doesn’t look like it’s supposed to, but I’m also sure that what I tend to want it to look like probably isn’t what it’s supposed to look like, too. I saw that the verse above was the Biblegateway.com verse of the day, and I was going to look for a different verse, but the question on my walk changed that. And the verse’s answers, while obvious, aren’t easy.

Our lives are supposed to be filled with grace. Dallas Willard said that mature Christians burn grace like a jumbo jet taking off. I’d say maybe like a rocket. But, what does a life of grace look like? Having returned to wanting to put grace on the table to examine, I went to the kitchen and got to work on the second of three bags of apples.

Apples. I use the term in a technically correct, but rather loose way. They came from an apple tree in a neighbor’s yard. He invited me to pick them. They looked horrific. Many of them were small, mangled, and covered with ugly, blotchy skin. Peeling them didn’t help – there were bruises, black cavities, and what looked like worm damage. These aren’t the sort of apples I would buy, but all I paid was the ten minutes it took to pick them. Some went into the trash whole because I couldn’t figure out how to peel them. Others got quartered and tossed because they looked so bad. But some had a little fruit I could salvage. Others had quite a lot of salvageable fruit. When I was done, I had enough to make a batch of applesauce.

As I peeled, my thoughts shifted to videos of painters. Some of them paint a heart or some phrase on the canvas, then obliterate that image as they prepare their canvas.[1] I’ve watched them use paint to sketch out parts of a face, then watched as those lines disappear. They have used browns, blues, reds, and colors that do not belong in human skin to depict the skin. Sometimes, they draw the eye or nose in then eradicate it and paint another. The thing that they don’t do (on camera at least) is to burn the canvas because they did something wrong and that ruined it.

This isn’t the picture of grace, but I think it is a picture of grace. Rather than declare everything worthless because it somehow fails to measure up, what can be kept and used is. Granted, there are apples I threw away as useless, and eventually, a painter may throw away a canvas, but the better the cook or painter, the more ability he/she will have to find and use what can be used, and the more wisdom in judging them. Things may not be used in the way we expect or want, but that God can and does use anything about us is a picture of grace, made possible through the actions of Jesus Christ.


[1] Forgive me if I use the wrong terms, painting is not an area of my expertise.

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