The presence of paradox in Christian existence never ceases
to amaze me. It reveals a small portion of the beautiful patterns of complexity
and simplicity in God's stain glass design as the laws of the universe work in
our lives. As I study grace, I find paradox refracting light everywhere, more than ever.
It seems to be the nature of the human condition. Here are a few examples:
-
“He who
exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be
exalted.”
- You have to learn to let go in order to
progress.
- The beginning of forgiveness is often in
accepting that what was done to you was not okay.
- You have to let yourself feel the pain in
order to heal it.
- The last shall be first and the first
shall be last.
-
It is in simultaneously
surrendering to God and setting out clear goals that you make progress.
- You find grace by reaching the end and
the bottom, and by acknowledging your complete poverty and brokenness you
find richness and wholeness.
- We can only come to God as little
children, who have nothing to bring to God in terms of material goods,
virtues, and accomplishments, because they haven’t been here long enough
to do these things.
Coming
just as we are, we begin to change. How can brokenness be a blessing? It can
because you are already closer to God when you throw yourself at your mercy in
this condition. There is no pretense, guile, affectation, or legalism to
work out of you. Those that have accomplishments, money, education,
virtue, looks, position, and reputation have to lay these things down and work
out the credit they take for those things, the striving they do to earn God’s
love through these things, and the acceptance they seek from leaning on these
assets. The thief, the prostitute, the disenfranchised, the poor, the ugly, the
abused, the ignorant, the hater, the self-hater, the alcoholic, the ridiculed,
the weak, the sinner, the lowly, the depressed, the sick—they already know that
they have nothing to offer God except to say, “Here I am” and throw themselves
upon His grace. In this poverty of things to boast about in us, there is
nothing to get in the way of God's grace.
All the assets in the world are good, and can be
used for good, but so often they get in the way. I have spent years striving
and working to earn God’s love, and for me, it was mostly on an unconscious
level because it was programmed into me. It seems too good to be true that God
wants us as we are, that there is nothing we can do to earn it, that not only
do we not have to compete with the lovely, strong, wealthy, or wise, but that
God despises such competition to compensate for our own inadequacies. He
bestows beauty, wealth, and wisdom on people to bless them, not because they
have done anything to deserve it, and when someone uses or displays those
assets, God does not give them more credit, love, points, acceptance, or
blessings than someone without them. God’s grace is unconditional, unmerited,
unearned and it is equal for all. The cliché that no one is no better than
anyone else regardless of the life conditions listed above, or sex, gender,
sexual orientation, race, experience--or whatever, is true.
That lovely acquaintance with three button nosed
kids who has a rich husband, went to Harvard, is a size two, and did mission
work in the Congo, God sees her righteousness, but not any more than he sees
your open and fragmented heart as righteous too, because of Jesus. But if God
gave you a looking glass into her heart, I’m willing to bet the person you
always compared yourself to as a measuring stick for how you should be, is
fragmented too. What you didn’t know is that one of her children has an unseen
congenital health problem, her husband is no longer in love with her, she has never
recovered from the death of a sibling and takes sleeping pills just to get
through the day, and she has a paper thin façade to cover that emptiness,
sadness she thinks others do not want to see. Maybe that girl is you even, and
you feel intimidated by the angry people that seem to dislike you because they
think you are stuck up, intimidating, and unapproachable.
All of us, in all these stations are broken,
fragmented, and incomplete and can be made whole on the leveling playing field
of God’s perfect grace. We are not perfect, but God is, and so it is okay. We
are all on a level playing field with God, and he doesn't care about our
attributes as much as our hearts--our fragmented hearts that, put together,
create the stained glass window in which God's light can shine through in 100
refracted colors. He makes brokenness beautiful, another beautiful paradox
among many God uses to work with us.
