Stories of Grace

Outside of the whole Jesus-dying-for-my-sins example, in recent times, I've had some awesome encounters with God's grace, and I want to write them down before I forget and cease to be thankful.

1. Through my last semester and a half at Rice University, my girlfriend's clinical depression was probably the hardest thing I'd had to deal with to date. One night in April, I was really wound up and emotionally exhausted, after several hours of trying frustratedly to talk her through some issues that had persisted for months. After my girlfriend left, I sat in my room, practically immobilized by emotional and physical exhaustion and a foreboding, heavy sense that I couldn't handle the difficulty and sacrifice of supporting my girlfriend through her struggles. I had never felt so alone or overrun by a situation. It came to the point where it was about 2:00 am, and I had punched walls and furniture until my knuckles were red and hurled things around the room, and then my friend Lauren dropped by our suite to visit a roommate and stopped in to say hello.

Lauren is also clinically depressed and has struggled for years with reconciling her emotions with reality and with how she interacted with her circumstances and the people around her. Lauren and I went for a walk and for the next hour and a half, she listened patiently as I rambled and vented, and she told me exactly what I needed to hear -- that I wasn't alone, that she knew from experience that being close to a depressed person is an incredibly hard thing, especially if you're one the only supports, and that this desperation and frustration and anger that I was experiencing was expected, and that I was doing a good job in an incredibly challenging role. She related it to her experience, and I really came to appreciate that Lauren is an incredibly good, patient, helpful friend, the kind who will walk with you at 2:00 am and listen to you vent and walk you through your catharsis. I felt like I was in 1000x better condition after talking to her than I had been in weeks. It's important to know that you're not a failure and that you're not alone, and it was a big revelation for me to understand that about myself when I had been trying for months to convey that to my girlfriend.

My girlfriend is doing 10x better these days. She is happy almost all the time, and things are a lot easier-going, at least for the time being. I love her to pieces. But what was Lauren doing stopping by my room at 2:00 am on a Tuesday night in April? Why would I have a visit from a person with extensive experience both being depressed and overcoming depression just as I reached a seemingly insurmountable impasse with the issue of depression?

Grace.

2. My disciple grew up in the Pentecostal Church, where they have a heavy emphasis on the significance of spiritual gifts: teaching, prophecy, speaking in tongues, etc. If you watch the documentary Jesus Camp, you can see a rather intense example of how the Pentecostal Church handles these gifts, as hundreds of kids shake and quiver and weep and speak in tongues, claiming that they have been swept up by the Holy Spirit. I've disagreed with Kyle on several counts, mainly on the basis that you can't replace the disciplines of studying the Word, of training disciples, of corporate worship, and of good planning and stewardship of God's resources with an unceasing reliance on the spontaneity of the Holy Spirit. For example, he had mentioned that an ideal weekly church service would be a group of people gathered together with no agenda or planning, and that they would just listen for the Holy Spirit to lead, and as a very last resort alternative, they might have a book of the Bible on standby to study. I completely disagree -- I think that the gifts of the Spirit have to be tempered for the edification of the church by the sense of judgment and reason that God gives us, not to mention His written word. If God left you in charge of a crop harvest (which He has), would you sit in your farmhouse and wait for things to grow, or would you be out there working in a disciplined way to plant and water and harvest in conjunction with relying on His miraculous work?

Kyle asked one day if we could talk specifically about spiritual gifts. He asked me what I thought about them. And just an hour beforehand, I had been going through passages in an arbitrary way (which sounds hypocritical in light of what I just typed, and probably was) and happened to read through 1 Corinthians 12-14, which talk explicitly about that very topic in a clear and elucidating way. And as a result of my being ready, having freshly gone through those passages, what followed was a really productive discussion on spiritual gifts and their role in the spiritual life of a believer and in the growth of the body of Christ.

Why would I have read 1 Corinthians 12-14, the most lucid exposition on spiritual gifts that the New Testament offers, an hour before Kyle asked me to discuss and share my thoughts on the topic with him? Why was I prepared (in the active sense, as in Someone preparing me) to engage with my disciple over an issue that was central to how he was raised spiritually?

Grace.

There are more, but it's getting late, and my point has been made.

What I really appreciate about instances of grace and the stories that come out of them is that they are all pointers to the ultimate story of grace between God and us. Every story of grace starts off when we find ourselves helpless to an insurmountable set of circumstances. Every story of grace includes an externally given, saving provision that we didn't affect and that we didn't deserve. Every story of grace ends on a note of transformation and restoration. In short, every story of grace is a beautiful retelling and reminder of the gospel story.