Still Surrounded by Grace, Hope and Love

I guess all of us are always surrounded by grace. I know it's true for me that I forget to notice most of the time. But ever since this black hole of emergency surgery and colostomy bags sucked me in two weeks ago, I can definitely say I am very aware how much my life is sustained by grace and hope and love.

I've been remembering the words to an old hymn: "grace greater than all my sin..." It's a nice thought, but what strikes me these days is the mystery of a grace greater than the corporate sin that this entire humanity continues to generate. I'm still reading my news feed with stories of duplicitous politicians, desperate boat people, deteriorating air and water and soil, greed, hate, hurt, betrayal... It's enough to make my gut cinch up all over again. Even so, I want to keep learning how to surround myself with this grace that is greater than all this sin. I want to learn how to acknowledge the world's pain without letting it paralyze me; to feel the pain without numbing myself to it; to let the grace flow. I can't close myself off from all this or else I close myself off from life itself.

I once preached a sermon about biblical hope: Hope with a Big H. Whenever my plans, my desires, my hopes get lost in the chaos of the cosmos and it seems as if everything I have ever counted on is shifting sand, I want to keep learning how to live each day grounded in this Hope with a Big H. I have every confidence that my second surgery come November will patch me back up better than new. But in the meantime, I have a lot of every days to live with this bizarre new reality. In each of these days, I want to live in the bigger, Hope-full reality of grace greater, grace sufficient, grace amazing.

I've been recalling the wise words of the gentle old nursery horse to the velveteen rabbit:

'[Real] doesn't happen all at once,' said the Skin Horse. 'You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.”
― Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit

Some of you don't know how very shabby I really am; I put on a pretty good front in order to look Real. But a lot of you see right through me and know me better than I'm comfortable with. And you love me anyway. This astounds me. I want to keep learning how to love like that; to open myself up to all our failures and infidelities and to love anyway. Hands on, Real Love.

That's what I've experienced from my Jerry - embodied love. That's what I feel from so many of you who have called and visited and texted and emailed and snail mailed... Thank you. I want to keep learning how to let that kind of love seep into my gut and break open my own closed off places; letting Real Love really change me into someone who Really Loves.

Surrounded every moment of every hour of every day with Grace, Hope and Love.