We’ve made grace difficult. That’s not, in itself, surprising; after all, we’re humans, and complicating simple things is what we do. During my undergraduate and graduate schooling, and even into my doctoral level work, I saw this tendency to overcomplicate what are by nature simple concepts. My field was education, and many, many, times the assigned reading demonstrated this phenomena. Instead of simply saying something like, “Some students don’t believe in their own ability to learn,” the author would dress it up in verbal finery: “Many cognitively challenged learners lack the self-efficacy to accommodate the personal wherewithal to adequately engage with the assigned curricular material in order to master the cognitive goals set forth by relevant dialectical investments.” Many times I would have to read and reread a particular passage in order to grasp what the author was trying to say. I literally knew and understood every single word in the passage, but they were put together in such a way that the intended meaning was obscured rather than conveyed.
That’s what we have done to grace, I fear. We’ve made it difficult. Complex. Convoluted. We’ve forgotten grace is a simple as:
—A woman daring to touch the edge of a robe.
—A thief simply asking to be remembered.
—A woman waiting for the first stone, which never comes.
—A cripple eating at the table of a king—the king his grandfather tried to kill.
—A foreign invader being healed in dirty river water.
—A murdering religious bigot struck blind, and then redirected to God’s service.
—A crowd of 5000 hungry on a hillside.
—A blind man seeing.
—A lame man walking.
—A dead man breathing.
—A bush burning.
—A brother’s wrestling match.
—A God descending.
—A God dying.
—A betrayer restored.
These are not theological expositions. These are not intellectual abstractions. These are not stories to be dissected and analyzed and categorized and systematized. These are stories to be told. And to be heard. And to be lived. Grace is me writing these words and you reading them. Grace is us abundantly alive. Grace is . . .
Peace.
