I recently had the opportunity to hear someone define God's Grace. This individual's explanation so moved me that I have to share it with you along with how I personally have experienced this Grace.
"Grace is a mystery that is undefinable. It is God's pursuit of a relationship with us independent of anything we have or haven't done, good or bad. It is unearned and undeserved. It needs to be received and it can be resisted. In essence, we are only able to be in a relationship with God because He pursues us. His pursuit of us led Him to send and sacrifice His Son, even when we were uninterested in Him, therefore we can be assured that God is interested in us and will use any means possible to reach us. Grace is about God's benevolence toward us and it's about His presence with us in any and every situation."
To me the key in this quote is that "It needs to be received..." During Kristen's illness, I soon realized that I had absolutely no control. This disease was bigger than I could handle. I was out of my comfort zone and broken. As a Christian, I began to turn to God. I read a lot, requested prayer, and just allowed God to carry me. So I "received" the grace that God so lovingly wanted to give me. His Grace came through resources given me by Christian friends. It came from reading and re-reading my Bible. It came from conversations and prayers with our clergy. It came through the readers of the blog and their prayers. God's Grace was all around me. It continues to surround me and lift me up each day.
Are you receiving God's Grace or are you resisting it? God is in constant pursuit of us. (Let me clarify here that I do not believe God is responsible for Kristen's illness. That is a whole other conversation.) Through her illness God held out His hand to me and said, "May I?" I thank Him every day that I reached for His hand and said, "Yes, please!"
