When you pray for easy and its awful…

I think we have all had moments where we pray with big deep breaths.

We are gripping tightly to a need.

We are ruthlessly hopeful.

We want this so badly that it physically feels like couch has landed on us and we want it off.

Your prayers and pleadings feel like they’re falling around you like cans on a display end cap at a grocery store.

Nothing seems smooth or easy.

I was raised on an elevator god, a vending machine god.

A god that would listen only if I was saved and right with him.

A god that counted all my actions and if I was found lacking or in sin, then I was getting what I deserved.

I just needed to pray and get right with him and then all would be well with my soul and I could go back being blessed and in his favor.

In this deepest part of me, I think I really did believe this.

I was damaged and broken and I was damned…how awful.

I have been pondering all of this for years now. The how of it all, not the why.

It seems to me we get told something from someone we trust and it sticks. We never question it again, until we do.

So, I have been really diving deep into grace. What I think it is and why we have it and how we get it.

It started with all the help my friends and family showed us during my illness and before the transplant. I wasn’t gong to church because the god I was raised to believe in, I was mad at, really mad.

I would stay home on Sundays but found that holy feeling on Wednesday when a friend brought lunch every week so Michael could have a day off from coming home on his lunch hour to fix me something. I noticed it when meals arrived by the couple that fed us every Monday for years.

I noticed it when I got picked up by a friend or niece and taken to a movie or for a chai tea.

A spend the night, a backyard pool that was made available to me anytime I wanted, a glass of wine with someone.

A brother that did my job and his too, when I could no longer work.

Holy moments started surrounding me.

Holy moments were in books and phone calls and visits.

God was showing up everywhere I had never looked before.

God wasn’t in a Bible I read and studied for answers. God was walking through my door and calling me on the phone and sitting next to me on the sofa.

All I had learned and believed I had to let go of and what I got in return, was grace.

Grace is the breath we breathe.

Grace is the peace we crave and push away in struggle and guilt. All we need to do to get it, is say yes.

Grace surrounds us everywhere, everyday in every way possible.

The scripture that says in Acts 17:28 ‘For in Him we live and move and have our being’….is grace.

I believe that we can “ pray without ceasing” and it won’t get answered. At least not immediately or even the way we wanted.

I also believe, that grace still matters in those moments.

Grace finds us where we are because it never left us. Grace is our gift for being alive. Easy or awful right now, grace is still there.

I love how Rob Bell finishes each podcast saying, “grace and peace” But, I believe grace is peace, if we let it be.

I believe we can feel and see and hear grace, when we need it, if we look.

Grace is something we get but it’s also something we can give.

So, give it freely today, you may be the only version of God the other person ever sees.