The Gaze of Grace

"Grace is thoughtful.

 It considers a back-story, 

and upbringing, 

the entire person,

 and not just a single tiny slice of their life."

 -J.S. Park

Grace. It's what softens us to love and gives us peace to stop striving. I think that as a Christian, it's been one of the hardest things for me to accept. I've seen in my life that I'm so opposed to allowing grace in that I exist in a constant state of strain and pressure. I'm always trying to do more, be better, work harder, and do work in myself that only God can do. But all it does is rob my hope, steal my joy, and leave me with my back turned to God, pushing Him away as I wallow in self condemnation. I think that to some extent we all live in this place. There's something about the concept that love and forgiveness and acceptance have been given to us freely, regardless of what we've done in the past or what failures we will have in the future, that is hard to swallow.

But it's true. It's the sweetest truth.

Our problem then, is in what we see. A key element of grace is that it is undeserved. So while we will never be able to see ourselves as creatures that deserve His grace, we can often fail to see that He looks at us as worth giving grace to.

Therefore, we can only come to accept grace when we accept that God sees what we do not see. When we look at ourselves and others from our limited perspective, we will never be able to see enough; we won't be able to see the past with enough clarity, the future with enough truth, or deep enough into ourselves and others to see the unwavering spirit of God's righteousness. But God has the ability to look to our past and know why He brought us through the things that He brought us through. He has the ability to look to the future and know what good He will use our failures for. He has the ability to look past our outer, fickle selves and see the steadfastness of His spirit living in us. And...He can see all of this at once, past present and future.

If we are to live in grace, we must choose to lay our own limited vision aside and trust that what God says He sees in us is truth. I know that I haven't enjoyed turning grace away, so I'm going to stop trying to make God treat me "fairly" according to my shortcomings and accept that He treats me with goodness instead.

As I'm learning to receive God's grace, I find hope in truth that God is the God who "calls into being the things that were not." (Romans 4:17). I know that God has already called my shortcomings into fullness, and that He sees the things that are "not" in me as if they already "are." I know that God can look at me and see me in the image of his Son, holy and righteous and complete, and that that is the bottom line of why I'm able to be looked upon with grace. And since God sees me as if I already "am" all of this, then I can choose to see me that way too.