Grace.

So today Holly and I went to Luke 14:12 and helped serve lunch to the homeless folks there. We'd just finished pouring the last of our milk and water when a friendly man walked up to the table and said one simple word.

"Grace."

After a pause (the length of which admittedly made me mildly uncomfortable), he began to explain. He explained that between dawn and 11pm you have the grace to be in the park, but after 11 at night, you can be arrested for the same activity--just being there. On game day at the Titans stadium, you have the grace to sit in the parking lot and drink a beer, but at any other time the same activities in the same parking lot would be severely reprimanded. "Grace is a period of time," he said, "but God's Grace is a lifetime."

Now at this point he began sharing his opinion that the King James Version is the only version that's really the Bible, and that the other versions and translations out there don't count because humans have messed with them. I s'pose we'll leave that discussion for a different day though. Back to the grace. Our new friend said several times: "I teach definitions." It's incredible to me how much a word can change when God's behind it. We Presbyterians like the whole idea of salvation by grace. That's not the kind of grace that lets you chill in a park or tailgate before a game. It's the kind that lasts a lifetime. The kind that says that no matter what you do, you will have God's love. My aunt and uncle gave me this book for graduation called God Never Blinks: 50 Lessons for Life's Little Detours. One of those lessons is: "God loves you because of who God is, not because of anything you did or didn't do." And that right there folks, that's grace. We don't deserve it, we take it for granted all too often, but it's there. And it's the lifetime kind.

Love,
Allison.