(This article is an excerpt of from my book, Earth and Sky: A Beautiful Collision of Grace and Grief1.)
What if the way we think about God is wrong, tangled and twisted in our view of a cause-and-effect world?
What if God isn’t sitting unaffected on the other side?
What if God is closer than we can imagine and more present than we are aware?
What if God is right in the mess of where you think it must end for you, when your heart seizes with fear and night is longer than day?
What if reprieve glimmered real in your darkest night?
When the pain of life threatens to separate us from God, I would imagine most, like me, try to bridge that gap. We want to make sense of it, whether by judging God or justifying what He allows. But life doesn’t always make sense, nor does it happen according to plan. Easy answers don’t exist for every difficulty.
But a solution does. Grace. God’s grace . . . a hunting love.
It stands, a lighthouse shining in the dark, firm against absorbing and unrelenting waves, providing hope for lost souls. Grace is a calling to a safe harbor in the storm. Grace is an end to the beginning, a restart forevermore. When life unexpectedly bends and crushes and collapses, we forget who we are and how we got here. Grace guides, lifts, and finds. We are pursued by a hunting love, belonging to Him who created and sustains all creation. Difficulties force us to know Him at a different level. A deeper level . . . without the fluff, but stronger, richer, and more real.
I’ll never forget one morning while I was driving. Everything seemed to grow louder . . . the sound of the road, the morning traffic around me, the oddest thoughts and the familiar ones.
I felt far from life. I felt eerily close to death. I felt betrayed and abandoned.
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