Coffee Shop Journal

Grace.

Unspeakable, unstoppable, unquenchable grace.

I saw it today.

Grace looked like a bare cement floor, empty cupboards and curtainless windows.

I don’t know know how to describe it, but it’s burning in my heart, so I have to try. Today Grace took the form of the house of a single mom I know. She’s been through the ringer. She has laid her heart open to her community of companions in a humbling display of contrition. Her life was just too overwhelming to walk through alone.

One by one the companions came. Some sorted precious belongings - few of those. Some threw out the flotsam of trash the world convinces us to horde and protect. Some brought order back, cleaned. Some came and ripped out the filthy carpets and painted the walls clean. Her house is a metaphor for her life: it is swept out now, waiting for the rebuilding process that will follow grace as surely as that wonderful smell follows the rain.

Grace looked like those bare cement floors, waiting for carpet, waiting for new life.

The best part of the journey was the diversity of her companions. The humbling part was that the hardest steps of the journey were accomplished with companions who had walked the very same road. In ripping out carpets and cleaning out cupboards they found healing from bits of their own pathways.

Grace. Undeserved, unmerited favor of an overwheming God who pours blessing after blessing over us in showers of life.