We really treat grace as a scarce commodity… 
I really treat grace as a scarce commodity…
I just wondered why we’re all so distant and suspicious and fearful… I wondered why I am still so distant and suspicious and fearful.  Still.  After 22 years of teachers insisting I have a God I can trust, after laying alone on bedroom floors and feeling Love roll over me like ocean currents, after reading 2000 year old words written in books that may as well have been entitled ‘Dear Stephanie,’ after the realest God-given provision I take for granted in the rising dawn, still: distant - suspicious - fearful.

I am learning more and more that failure to give is a result of failing to receive.  I have so much and yet I fail to own anything - or to own what counts it seems, for I have refused to adopt as mine that which has been offered.  I still have an instinct in me that recoils at positions of vulnerability and potential disappointment, hurt, failure and embarrassment. (Who doesn’t?) In me these potentials are things to be avoided at all costs.  In haunting revelation, I know I have consequently been avoiding the grace of God at all costs. 

Putting myself in situations where the grace of God can be manifested most potently is something I must fight to do everyday.  When we expose ourselves to the Gospel, many of the tactics we relied on for safety prior, become revealed as our worst enemy.  The Gospel must realign our thinking.  Everything I am tempted to run from become the places that I must run into if I really trust God as much as I say I do.  Every smile I am tempted to withhold in the event of unreciprication,
every conversation I am tempted to clutter with insincerity or safe sarcasm,
every prayer I neglect,
every fear I fail to face,
every relationship I prematurely abandon,
every motive I defend,
every person I pass off for whatever reason we justify passing someone off for (too loud, too quiet, too needy, too cold, too loose, too self-centered, too unpredictable…)
every opportunity I shuffle past,
every inconvenience I avoid,
every abundance that I waste - I am actually wasting, avoiding and shuffling past the grace of God.  Aren’t these the reasons, in the end, that we refrain and isolate? And hence aren’t we really saying that our God does not have enough grace to pull us through on this one?  In denying an opportunity to receive from Him I am denying the opportunity to give. 

He is already here, more plentiful than the air we breathe.  Do we ever ask, ‘Are we allowing ourselves, in this moment, to experience as much of the grace of God as he is doling out to us?’ Are we allowing ourselves the pleasure and privilege of living in a capability and desire that extends far beyond anything we’ve ever dreamed for ourselves?  Do I live a life that screams, ‘My God is abundant in security and mercy and love, regardless of the apparent risk’? The more I allow Him in these places (the distant, fearful, suspicious places) the more of Him I receive in these places. The more I receive of Him in these places the more of Him I am able to give - to others, to myself and back to Him.  Is his grace a scarce commodity that we must calculatingly allow prioritized space for?  A delicate commerce that must be held in deposits or paid in full? Are there doors you can open in which His grace will not follow you though?  Though I have lived believing this was the case for so long, I now pray we are quick to take the step of courage and faithfulness and forgiveness and openness and prayerfulness and loving kindness remembering and trusting that His unending-no-limit grace will always step to meet us there, even in the grimmest of surroundings.

(c) Stephanie Diaz-Schumm