How many of you have had that sudden feeling of missing something,
like- your keys, or your purse?
There’s this experience of…
Oh please God, please God, please…, please, please, please….
Or, Oh man, Where are they,,,,
Panic, now that’s a full bodied feeling.
It’s like when you get a blood pressure check up and you can feel the cuff squeeze around your arm, but panic squeezes your brain, and the brain either works better under pressure, or else it just goes doohhhh…
You know most people have felt this though…
When people are feeling this kind of panic and loss
They can be like, oh God I’ll do anything for you, if you’ll only help me find this thing or that person, or whatever’s the case….
And then “we” people start making promises,
Like,
Oh God, if only you help me get back my purse or wallet,
I promise God I’ll be in church every Sunday… Or, I’ll give the money to the poor, etc. etc…, if only I could get it back, find it again, ….
The list of promises goes on and on…
But and here is where the Gospel stories of grace get interesting…
Because those same people who really needed God’s help to find somebody or something in their lives, those same people who had promised God… practically everything back in return…, the same people, when God’s grace becomes true, when they find God’s love surrounding them, and the universe actually being nice to them for one day at least,
The grace of God in their stories is that these people actually follow through with their promises to God, and the result is.. celebration… Good times, good people around, and God’s amazing grace being shared.
So, whenever we make promises to God, and then experience God’s amazing Grace, the point is then to simply follow through with the faithful plan that you had promised, because the truth is that it will be good, it will feel good, it’ll be celebration, it will be good because then God’s grace is shared with others, and you are realizing your promises.
Grace happens in God’s power to reconnect things and reconnect people especially… because for God, it’s not ultimately not about just things, and that’s pretty obvious, but I had to say it. For God, grace is about finding people, finding people who had forgotten how to ask for God’s help, until suddenly they’re in a panic.
But let me take this deeper to understand this grace that God really gives, because it can be a whole lot more mysterious then finding a long lost set of keys…
Because the divine mystery, the mystery of finding when all seemed lost..
This sudden reuniting can happen with much deeper connections
In ways that are unexplainable, except to say God must be behind it all.
We have these experiences of grace, that we simply can’t explain in any other way
Even more astonishing than a prayer being answered.
This is a life that finds grace… a sinner that is reconnected with God.
Carolyn Myss, who is among my favorite authors,
recalls the story of a relationship that experienced this kind of grace.
This true to life story goes as follows…
There was this one woman she knows who had two young children,
And in this one situation, she was going to be divorced
and it was breaking her heart,
absolutely breaking her heart that her husband wanted a divorce…
and her little children were 3 and 5…
and she did not want this divorce to happen,
but it was one of those situations where
a misunderstanding starts
and it got out of hand
through pride, and hubris…
and pride is so toxic
so toxic, hideously toxic,
so what she did was,
she finally recognized……..,
and therein lies the great opening for grace
she recognized….,
I am poisoned
I’m poisoned,
I am poisoned
And she got on her knees
And she said
“God, do whatever it takes,
If this can be saved…
I see my own sins of pride in this
I don’t want to lose him…”
He was going to his lawyers to get papers for divorce,
And do you know what he found in his briefcase?
A love letter, she had written, when they were in college…
How did that get in there?
It was not a briefcase that he had in college.
She didn’t put it in there…
How did that find its way???
Finding a love letter from college…
And it wiped the slate clean, And they started again…
How did the letter get there?
Who knows???
You could use all the logic you want
But the logic is totally preposterous…
Come on, only those two knew about the letter…
Much less of whether it had still existed,
Or of the many letters..
It was so preposterous because it had been twelve years since they had been in college..
That was it,
And the slate was clean…
Lord Jesus, Create in us a clean heart, and renew a right spirit within us…
Amen, Let us stand…
