It’s so beautiful here, but there is so much loss

Common grace is the family you have when the world around you shakes - mom in the kitchen, dad making coffee, grandma still there to tell you stories if you’ve got her, a sibling you can text and say “what is going on right now?”

It’s the beautiful September day with the leaves still turning different hues of red and yellow the same way they did last year while the news is on in the living room.

It’s the rain falling and the clock ticking and the rise and fall of your breath to match.

It’s the way the day keeps going and the sun makes its way across the sky the way it did yesterday, even if the circumstances beneath it have changed drastically .

It can’t be earned.

It’s not deserved.

You wake up every morning and have no control over whether you do or not, but we don’t think about that too often.

It’s so beautiful here, but there is so much loss.

And common grace still finds us, it’s extended to us somehow. It’s not something we can take because it’s not ours to give, we can’t get our hands around it. We fool ourselves to think we can. We open our eyes in the morning assuming we did that, we made that happen. No, we didn’t.

Grace is God’s to give, and I know He gave it to me when I didn’t even know what it was, know what to call it, know I was breathing it in every moment. And there was a time when I knew it was grace I didn’t deserve. A free gift, but why? A Hand held out, but why? Eyes to see, but why?

God rarely answers the why, I’ve realized. But He does answer with His presence, with love, with Himself. With Jesus and the Cross. With grace for all the ways I say the wrong thing and mess up and hurt the ones I love and take my life into my own hands by thinking I walk, and talk, and open my own eyes and make plans for the day like I own the day. Like it’s mine, like it couldn’t all go away in one second.

And it does for some. It did for some this week.

And what do we have after that?

The answer is Jesus. We have eternity because of Jesus. That grace to choose Him and live forever and have every tear wiped from our eyes (Revelation 21:4). But that’s what it is, a choice. A grace for those who believe and have asked for forgiveness and been forgiven. I hope you will.

The truth is there is so much loss, but it’s still so beautiful here.

And I hope you count that as grace because that’s exactly what it is. We don’t have the power to wake up in the morning and one day we won’t. I hope you know when that day comes exactly where you’re headed. Home. ❤️