Mere minutes ago I was in the movie theater, watching “The Impossible”, the remarkable true story of a family that was caught in the devastating 2004 Tsunami while visiting Thailand for Christmas vacation. The story is emphatically wrenching but beautiful and highly recommended. Because I want you all to see it, I don’t want to give anything away. But, we all remember the terrifying images of that day, so it’s no secret that it would have been a terrible thing to experience firsthand.
After watching the recounting of this story, I feel wretched and battered. I am reminded at how completely we can lose everything: our lives, families, health, wealth. We walk on this tightrope of grace all our lives. We either receive it, or we don’t. But, it’s never deservedly so. Without just explanation, the reasoning, the rhythm and the luck of each of us wanes and rises, whether we seem to deserve it or not. Life floods each of us with opportunities for failure, for regret, for pain. Yet, so often we are spared. Not so that we go forth with bubbled, safe, sweet-tasting lives and avoid all pain, but that we have less agony than could have been.
As depressing as that sounds, I mean it as hope.
Something as abstract as grace is hard to appreciate with our noses pressed up hard against the glass. We are pressed so close to our struggle and pain that we miss how blatant and continuous we are spared from gross suffering. Not that we are spared always. But, we are spared often.
And with grace being offered to all of us so consistently, certainly we can do better to offer it more consistently as well. For, at the least, those people in our life deserve grace from us as little as we deserve it from anyone else.
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