Grace

A friend called and wanted to talk. She came into my office, sat with her backs to those big windows in ways I could only see her silhouette, she said that she did not care about anything anymore; she wanted to jump off the cliff and kill herself; for her there was nothing that would stop her and she was ready to get out of this horrible life. Another friend dropped by to say that she was hurting; she gave and gave, but no one loved her back; her trust was betrayed; people stepped on her like dirt. These are stories that our neighbours share with us. They are God’s grace, pains of suffering God, pointing us to life that is love.

How so? How could these broken people and their lives of pain and suffering be the very grace of God that we read about in our Holy Scriptures? Are they not living the consequences of their mismanaged lives? Are they not paying for wrong choices they made?

If we do not know anything about God’s grace, if we think that we live lives of our own making—that is, we believe that our comfortable life is due to our hard work—and that all that we have belongs to us for our own pleasure, then, we do not see in them the presence of one who loved us even unto death on the cross. Instead of seeing Christ in them we only see people deserving pain and suffering for their pathetic choices. In them we see nothing but missed opportunities to better themselves and therefore are nothing more than people who failed in life. Instead of loving, we pity them. They become objects of our charitable programs; we do not see them as partners in life journey.

On the other hand if we are grateful for what we have been entrusted with, if we experience God’s grace daily in all that we do, and if we have been recipients of God’s generosity even when we have not been deserving of it, then, we can begin to see and witness how God comes to us and gives us grace.

When we come to a point of receiving encounters with those who are broken and are suffering terribly in our world as God’s grace being entrusted to us, we become fellow pilgrims in life more than willing to share where we find our food.