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.
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