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UNEXPECTED GRACE
“Grace descends as the gentle rain from heaven.
It does not divide, does not rank.
It floats like a cloud high in the sky,
and the thirsty pray for it as desert nomads pray for rain.”
-Philip Yancey
In his book Prayer: Does it Make any Difference, Phillip Yancey tells the story of a pastor who experienced a moment of grace in a very dark period of his life.
Lee Van Ham, a Presbyterian pastor, kept a prayer journal during a battle with testicular cancer. At first he wrote many pages, both listening and talking to God during the initial shock of illness. After surgery, the communication simply stopped. He leaned on the prayers of others but found no ability to pray himself. He began to lose heart, overwhelmed with grief at the prospect of life that would likely be cut short before his children grew up and before grandchildren arrived.
“How do I live these days of low energy in which I'm more aware of having to let go of things than doing them?” he prayed, asking the same question over and over. One day an answer came: “With love. With great love.”
“I began to practice doing the simple things with love. I loaded and unloaded the dishwasher with thoughts of love. It was very different from thoughts such as “if I didn't have to do dishes, I could do more important things.” Or, “It seems I'm doing more than my share of this mundane stuff.” I practiced waiting in love while the computer started up instead of fidgeting and scolding the machine's sloth. On days when I could drive, yellow lights at the intersections became reminders to brake, to stop and to refocus my life in love, not accelerate and hurry …”
“I realized how dark the theater had been for several weeks. Now it was apparent that in that darkness and in the vast emptiness behind the stage of my soul, God had been forming divine and eternal thoughts to present to me: ‘With love, Lee. Live these days with great love.’ It chanted inside of me many times throughout the day and still does.
God's grace had descended on a parsonage in Illinois It followed Lee to California, where he began to serve a new parish, with love. Through illness, he learned an attitude that can last a lifetime.”
In a period of history when darkness looms large on the horizon, it is tempting to give into despair and lose heart, like Pastor Van Ham did when he felt God was no longer listening to his prayers. The daily litany of war, mass deportations, gun violence, economic uncertainty, natural disasters, and environmental calamity seems overwhelming, beyond our ability to fix or make right again, so we become jaded and compassion fatigued. We stop caring and paying attention because it's just too painful.
Then in ways we never imagined or expected, god's grace meets us in our place of frustration and anxiety and suddenly we are made to see the world in which we live with entirely new eyes—eyes of love. What a wonderful gift, and the difference it can make is beyond measure.
Mother Teresa of Calcutta once said; “We can do no great things—only small things with great love.” She did not take this approach because she did not wish to help all the sick and dying of Calcutta. She simply realized: “We can do no great things.” And, sweet irony, the skein of small things she so lovingly did won her a following that continues to do small, beautiful things for the helpless and hopeless to this day. That is the power of looking at the world through the lens of love, it changes even the mundane acts of service which everyone of us can do to divine epiphanies where God's presence is felt and experienced in a place it might not have.
Mother Teresa said she did small things with great love. I've come to believe that is also the best we can do. Small things done with great love will change the world!
He is Risen!
Pastor Greg
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