My Grace is Sufficient for Thee

Her name was Grace and she was used to change my life.

I have come to the understanding that God is big. So big in fact, that I may never understand Him. This is something I have had to come to terms with, for I am human and there is this thing inside of me that wants to elevate myself. I have believed for a long time that I am way more important than I truthfully am. In all honesty, realizing that there is something bigger than my comprehension, is refreshing. What if you believed in a God that was comprehendible? Wouldn’t that make God small and finite? IF I believed in a God that I could understand completely, wouldn’t that make me important and God less significant? 

I believe in a God that makes me smaller. I believe in a God that I may never comprehend. I believe in a God that causes me to ask some deep things about life that I may never have an answer to. That being said, I am going to share some things that I don’t completely understand. I am going to share some heartaches of my own, and humble myself to help show a bigger God than I could ever fathom.

Grace was my baby. She died before I ever knew her. I miscarried soon after I found out  about her. Her short life deeply effects my own. She has changed me in ways I still do not understand. 

At the time I was a heavy drinker and a heavier smoker. My life was not worth living and I daily would describe myself as hopeless. My choice of suicide was not a quick end, but a life of torment. My tool of death was alcohol. The relationship I was in was based on lust not love and had begun to spiral to sick end. We were detaching and it seemed obvious to most that there were more problems in our relationship than not. 

At this point in my life I was a very hardened and calloused being. One thing I see as the most significant change since being saved, is my demeanor. I was so harsh and obviously broken then. My attitude was bigger than I could handle, and it got me in so much trouble. I see a significant difference in the way I used to stuff my emotions and feelings and broken nature deep inside myself, and when I would begin to leak out (which honestly was often) I would drink (which was also often). There was a need to muffle the realities of my dark state. I wanted nothing to do with anything that made me feel.

Grace changed all that. I knew long before I was willing to take the test that I was pregnant. The thought of having a baby with the BOY I was dating at the time was terrifying. My entire body changed. I could feel a shift on the inside. All my selfish atoms, were now shifting to become life bearers. I was altered and growing, something bigger than me was happening, and I could feel it.

I also knew that I had lost her before the reality of it took place. The change in my body backfired. I could feel the death coursing through my veins. The fight for life and death, brought a quick and sudden end to the desperate hope that I had found for a split second. I knew that I was full of death and despair and this only proved it. 

Just as quickly as I had stopped drinking, I began again. My boyfriend was intent on mourning through this, and I was intent on forgetting it ever happened. I couldn’t deal with death and loss, much less one that I felt that I had caused. How could a baby grow in me? I was so full of physical, emotional, and spiritual toxins; how could I have ever brought life to this madness? I ran from the devastation and thus lost my attachment to reality. I quickly realized that the madness I was living in was a delusion and that maybe if I found an adventure to love, that life would soon follow. The half life that had become my reality was no longer enough. 

I believe that Grace’s short life instigated a change in my life. It took me a few more years to really find my hope, but I will always go back to Grace as the starting point in my journey home. 

There is significance to her name. After running from her for years, I was able to face the pain of her short life, soon after I was saved. Grace. Her life was God’s grace intervening in my own. His mercy, His compassion, His tenderness. Now don’t get me wrong when you hear me say these words. God’s GRACE in my life ended in death for one, but life for another. God’s MERCY in my life was that even though I was deeply hurting His heart, He interposed Himself and brought me a taste of hope; a small peep through a window into something bigger than me. He had compassion and tenderly dealt with me in a way that only He could have done.

We don’t often associate death and destruction with the happy-go-lucky God we have in our heads. The truth is God will move in any means necessary to interrupt our lives. Whatever it takes to get our attention He is willing to go there-even when we are not. This is what makes Him God, and I human. I would not go deep enough to reach you. I would not be willing to hurt you to make you stronger. In the book of Jeremiah in the Bible, the prophet speaks of a God who is willing to brake a bone that has been set wrongly, to make it right. Can you imagine the force and strength it takes to break a bone in your leg that has healed wrong? More than I can offer. Can you imagine trying to break a child’s leg that has healed improperly? How do you communicate the reality of the pain you are about to inflict on an old wound? Something that hurts this child continuously, that has effected the way they walk and move. How do you say to this child that there will be healing and restoration out of this? 

You can’t. 

This is the way that God has to communicate to us at times. We are in pain, some that is self-inflicted, but mostly that has come from this broken and terrible sin-filled world that we are in. God wants to heal us, but we cannot see the good. We cannot comprehend that something so terrible in our lives would ever bring good. We are children in our thinking. His foresight is perfect. His mercy is real. His grace is sufficient. The beauty of believing in a God that is bigger than whatever you can come up with, means that you don’t have to control it. You don’t have to know the ins and outs of why these things are happening. You are only required to deeply love a God who has it all. The earth is the Lord’s...and everything in it. I do not have to understand the why, but I do have to understand the reality of it being bigger than me.

I leave you with this, the realities of the God I love and the hope that He brings: 

Our firm decision is to work from this focused center: One man died for everyone. That puts everyone in the same boat. He included everyone in his death so that everyone could also be included in his life, a resurrection life, a far better life than people ever lived on their own.

Because of this decision we don't evaluate people by what they have or how they look. We looked at the Messiah that way once and got it all wrong, as you know. We certainly don't look at him that way anymore. Now we look inside, and what we see is that anyone united with the Messiah gets a fresh start, is created new. The old life is gone; a new life burgeons! Look at it! All this comes from the God who settled the relationship between us and him, and then called us to settle our relationships with each other. God put the world square with himself through the Messiah, giving the world a fresh start by offering forgiveness of sins. God has given us the task of telling everyone what he is doing. We're Christ's representatives. God uses us to persuade men and women to drop their differences and enter into God's work of making things right between them. We're speaking for Christ himself now: Become friends with God; he's already a friend with you.

How? You ask. In Christ. God put the wrong on him who never did anything wrong, so we could be put right with God.

 1 Corinthians 5:14-21 MSG