Grace is the ongoing relationship God wants to have with you. In fact, truth be told, that relationship is already part of who we are. When God created us, God left a deep hole, deep down, that longs for a relationship with the God who created us. We can hide from it all we want, but it is still there. And it has less to do with how much a goodie-goodie we are or not than it does with God’s wanting in to our lives. As I have said before, that is what Jesus is all about and that desire continues to this day. We stumble. We create our own gods easier to see. In our human desire to be central to our experience of life, we slowly begin to pass over the God of creation.
Grace is God’s answer to our self-imposed alienation. You see, Jesus died because people like us could not believe him when he said he was God-come-down. “Crucify him. We don’t need a personal God. We are our own.” In the Resurrection, Jesus returned to be with those who turned from him and shouted those words. To me that Jesus rose from the dead is what that churchy word “salvation” really means. God knocking at the door I have locked to keep God out. If God acted like we do when someone bruises us, Grace would be an empty word signifying nothing. No. Grace is God’s continual seeking us out when sometimes things of God could not be further from our thinking.
The key is opening ourselves up to this grace of God’s relationship with us. We need to move away from our love of stuff toward the relationship God offers us. We need to empty ourselves of all we put in the way of the relationship that means more to us than any other relationship we have ever known. Before we hold the grace of God in our hands, we have to empty them of whatever gets in the way.
If we can empty our hands and hearts of those earthly gods and reach out for the grace-filled relationship God wants with us, we will come to know and see something that will make a great difference in the quality of our personal lives.