Grace and truth

It’s Christmas week, God. You know about Christmas. It was your idea in the first place. Whether it was actually December 25, or even December when you put your son on earth is incidental to the deeper meaning of Christmas.

John puts it rather well: “The Word became flesh and pitched his tent among us, and we saw his glory, the glory of the only son of God, full of grace and truth.”

I am quite aware of the truth side. It’s the grace I’d like to discuss. Sometimes your grace seems rather random.

I heard someone say recently that the sovereignty of God is easy to believe when it goes our direction, but not easy when it makes no sense to us. See, I understand your grace when I read about Charity’s SUV swirling like a snowflake the other day across the highway, in and out of trucks and vans, totally encased in your grace so that she landed on the other side of the highway, facing oncoming traffic, totally unscathed, with no damage to the car. That grace is palpable.

I’m having a harder time with Sarah who lies dying, surrounded by her parents, her siblings, her husband and her little children. It’s been just weeks since she learned she was ill, and now death. At Christmas? This is grace?

I don’t think they understand either. Equally palpable.

Then I step back a pace and try to look it life from your perspective. A day is like a thousand years. A thousand years is like a day. My life is just a preface to eternity. Sarah’s life, Charity’s life, mere decimal dust in comparison to the way you see time.

If the God who created the universe chose to encase himself in the confines of humanity and walk a dirty earth, does he not understand human suffering? You wept when Lazarus died. Then you raised him from the dead. That was grace and truth side by side. And glory, not to forget glory.

This Christmas I will ponder eternity again. And in the midst of sorrow and joy, pain and gladness, I will remember that eternal God became finite man so that finite man may taste eternity.