What Grace Feels Like

At a church retreat this weekend another member and I sat in the dining hall discussing the primary notion of the book, What's So Amazing About Grace (Phillip Yancy). "What is so great about Grace?" I asked. He mentioned some points that weren't new to me, but nonetheless true and relevant. I agreed with them but it didn't matter. "Well I know all that," I said "but I'm just tired of hearing about Grace. Grace, Grace, Grace, Grace, Grace, Grace, Grace. It's so overused that I take it for granted. I can barely remember what it felt like not to have Grace, being a person who grew up in the church and heard about it all the time. I only remember a period when I fell away from God and the difference from that period of time to when I really came into my faith for the first time. But how long can you hang onto that? I don't know what it's like not to have it so I just can't feel it."
He had remarked that I seemed to be a person who was pretty in tune with Grace. "well, I don't feel it," I said, "at least not today."

Three years ago I had just taken my first teaching job and was working with high school aged young ladies with autism. I remember swimming in our pool one day with one of them. She loved being chased in the water and her eyes sparkled in this remarkable way as she laughed heartily and infectiously. We swam in the deep end and the sunlight fell upon the water through a skylight so that the pool just appeared to be a light-filled, warm, moving body. I remember thinking then, "life just doesn't get better than this." It was then that I became convinced that heaven must be made up of sparkling pools of light and children's laughter.

Grace, Grace, Grace. What is Grace, anyway? I always think back to my basic religions class in college where my professor explained the difference between Grace and Mercy. Mercy is not getting the bad you do deserve, Grace is getting the good (or favor) you don't deserve. When we're speaking of it in Christian circles we're usually using the word to refer to a specific kind of Grace- the salvation we receive that we don't deserve through Jesus' death on the Cross. This is what I can't always feel. I wasn't there, I didn't see it- I didn't know a world where Jesus hadn't yet died for my sins. I was raised within the idea of salvation, within a world of Grace. Jesus' death to forgive my sins seems so removed and abstract sometimes- I don't feel how it impacts my daily life. Sure He makes me free, but when you're basically born into freedom and live in it everyday, how to you conceptualize it or even know what freedom is since you've barely known jail?

Heaven filled with children's laughter- that notion isn't quite biblically supported, I know. I remember talking about this to a friend of mine. Moreover, I remember considering whether my love for children and my passion to work with them had become an idol. I view it as a calling and my work with children has been tied to my faith so long that I wondered if perhaps I had confused them- had they become interchangeable to me when in reality, God and children are not the same thing? If God asked me to give up teaching, give up working with children, would I? I think, in fact, I know the answer is yes, although my friend posed this question: "If there aren't children in heaven, are you interested in going?"  I thought back to the pools of light, the laughter I felt convinced had to be there because it was the greatest blessing I'd ever known. "Here's the thing," I answered (At this, my friend laughed because apparently, this is supposed to be an easy "yes" or "no" question) "anything truly good is God. All the good things that I love in the world, I love because I love God- He can be found in it. So all the parts of the things that I love will be there in heaven- even if they don't resemble the things I know now."

It's three years later and some things have changed. I no longer work with teenage girls and the student of whom I spoke has been gone from our school for some time now. Today I threw a giggling elementary aged boy up into the air, as he came crashing down into the water splashing and then jumping on top of me, wanting me to hold him and bounce him I thought, as I had about my girls not so long ago, "this is the greatest blessing I've ever been given." Quickly, I chastised myself, "no, that's not right- I'm not supposed to believe this is better than the Grace I've been given by Jesus" although, I couldn't feel that above the love and complete and total blessing I felt in this moment. Perhaps this love of children was an idol, perhaps I didn't appreciate God's Grace at all. My student looked at me adoringly with his big onyx orbs, laughing so joyfully in the water, the boy that once couldn't even enter a pool area. It was then I knew that all of these things were the same. Grace- when we are given the blessings we don't deserve. As sinners, what are we deserving of? Every blessing- every smile, every laugh, every moment of friendship, every glimpse of beauty, every piece of blue sky, ever sliver of light is a bit of Grace. And every bit of it we only have access to because of the freedom we have in Christ, because we have a forgiving God who wants to know us and love us (whether we've accepted Him or not) and writes love letters to all of  us each day, hoping we'll fall in love and start coming home. Because of the Grace I've known for years but think I can't feel- the Grace I have from Jesus' dying on the cross to overcome darkness, I get the Grace I know every second, every day- the little bits of light I catch because Someone let them loose into an otherwise dark and broken world.

I know heaven must be filled with children's laughter, at the very least in a new form, because I know heaven is filled with Grace- in fact, it's made up of it.