Thoughts on Grace, Love, and Time

Grace – a word I never really understood. Semantically it represents something that everyone talks about, but only a few really understand – the few that actually live it; if, in fact, it is metaphysically possible to live it. Perhaps what is meant is that their lives have been defined by grace (the noun); therefore, they express grace (the verb). Or perhaps it is much more dramatic than that. Perhaps the act of grace has actually given them a new life – no, LIFE itself! Perhaps, grace was the force that cracked the shell of the egg in which they once lived and allowed them to live a different life altogether.
I once knew a boy bound to the past, or rather, who bound others to the past. Meaning and value were defined by the good he had done, the bad he had not done or the bad he managed to avoid. Living by this golden scale, he measured everyone to precise increments, often pretending to be shocked when he discovered that they were lacking on the side of the scale labeled “good.”
Try as he might he couldn’t resist the temptation to weigh the lives of others. All this was being done secretly in the hope that he would confirm that they were worse off than he- even if only by a fraction of a gram. It’s a very hard thing to live by a scale you know will always find you lacking. The only comfort is that you might be lacking just a little less than the next guy. But what a distasteful comfort that is. It is no different than comparing one rotten apple with another; neither is fit for eating.
This was his fate.
Then one day he fell in love with a peculiar woman – a woman who “lived grace.” Try as he might not to weigh this beautiful thing he had discovered, he eventually succumbed to the old habit. It was a terrible thing. He didn’t want to weigh her. It didn’t feel right. There was something deeply wrong about it; but, as beautiful as her freedom was, it was more than he could bear. The grace she lived suggested the law he lived was no longer the rule.
It has been said that, “The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.” I love this idea. There are several profound thoughts captured in that phrase. The first is that we must learn to love. This I have found, is certainly the case. The second is that there is a immense difference between loving and being loved. The third is that there is an mystical connection between the two – being loved and loving. But this is where the phrase breaks down. The order of learning has been reversed and the cart has been placed before the horse. God says that we love because He first loved us. God Himself is love and if we have not fully dealt with the ramifications of accepting His love than we have not loved. It is an impossibility.
It might be argued that loving is much easier than being loved. True….true, if and only if one has already accepted love. You can not love if you have not accepted God’s love- God’s grace. But once you have you are free to love others.
You see, my dear friend could not accept grace because it invalidated his value and meaning. It rendered his scales useless. Oh, his golden scale wasn’t lying. It worked just fine. The woman he loved was found lacking on the side of the scale labeled good. The problem was that the scale was altogether a useless artifact in a system of weights that measure not works but faith, not the exterior but the heart. It was a system that functions with Christ as the standard weight, a system that automatically credits each life with a critical mass larger than the universe in which it exists. It credits each with Christ Himself. The problem wasn’t that her actions couldn’t be weighed, it was that she could not be weighed. The life she lived was not a life that can be weighed. It is altogether a new sort of life.
And such is the power of grace – it allows the present to shape the future just as the past shaped today. The scale on the other hand, although truthful as it might be, binds us to the past relentlessly refusing to let the present shape the future. This quote was dropped into my life the other day and I think it is very powerful. “Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift. That is why it is called the present. ” How fitting that the gift of grace would gift us with a “present” to be lived.