GRACE

Hello my friends.  How did you spend this beautiful day?  I hope you were able to enjoy it, and can count it as another day closer to our healing.  I have spent nearly all day on the computer in meetings or on the phone encouraging folks.  I am realizing how hard people are working in the midst of this "time off."  Parents are working from home, which might seem like a break, until you throw in teaching school, cooking, and cleaning into the mix.  Professors and teachers have had to completely re-arrange everything they had prepared for their classes....for the rest of the year.  Single people are feeling the solitude, and yet I have spoken with many married people who understand the kind of deep loneliness that exists even when people are around.  

Time is a gift, and can also give us pause to really think about things that we don't normally have time to ponder.  Time can lead us into the beauty of seeing ourselves more fully than we have previously, or may challenge us to change some of the destructive patterns that creep into our lives.  I have spoken with people who have been feeling a deep sense of peace, and others who are filled with grief, some who are feeling angry, and others just feeling a bit undone altogether.  

My colleagues are spent.  We are weary.  All of a sudden the rules of ministry all changed on us, and we are scrambling to be the best pastors we can be, and gather people who aren't supposed to gather.  Some of us are blessed with congregations that can withstand the financial challenge we are facing, while other friends are wondering if their churches will survive this in the end.  In the midst of that, we love our people the best we can, and we let them love us back....and God is in the middle of it all holding it together.  

This has all got me thinking about grace.  How have you experienced grace today?  What does grace look like in your life?  To know that nothing we do, or don't do....say, or don't say.....could make our God love us any more or any less.  God loves us at max capacity, because God IS Love.  I wish, as humans, we could really grasp onto the magnitude of that - because it would change everything from the way we see ourselves, to the way we see our enemies and those who challenge us the most.  

So tonight as I finished the hard part of the day, I got to thinking about a song that I love.  It pretty much says it all, but it challenges us to be kind to ourselves.  In these uncertain days, when we don't do things as perfectly as we like, or have things as together as normal, the best gift we can offer ourselves is grace.  

Click here to listen to the song: Be Kind to Yourself, by Andrew Peterson.  It's a good one.


Grace upon grace, my friends.
Pastor Devon