If I Had Another Daughter, I’d Name Her Grace & Mercy, Or
Graercy
I remember being a kid (now that I’m thirty-one, I can say that)
and trying to think up the most difficult situation I could imagine. I suspect
some examples would have been:
“Eating at the lunch room table by myself,”
“Not having enough money to go on the Senior Trip,”
“Being left out of a particular group,”
“Not getting the lead in the school play.”
I look at that time in my life and think, “What in the world was I
thinking? I thought those were
tough?” It’s funny though, because I do think each age, each season, you really
do feel it’s the hardest, the most intense and insurmountable. And I wonder
when retrospection comes into play and you say, “The worst of it is behind me?”
It’s even slightly ironic that we feel the “right now it’s the
worst” since we so frequently live in the past and future. We’re concerned about something that hasn’t
happened yet; robbing us of today because we check out of the every day and
praying something we did in the past doesn’t one day catch up to bite us in the
ass (respectfully of course).
Over and over again, I realize how under appreciated Grace and
Mercy are, and how frequently we try to go it without them. These are the only
two mentioned renewable fuels we are freely given every single day and yet we
putter along on the fumes of yesterday.
I think we do it because for a couple of reasons.
Either we don’t think we need Grace and Mercy, which quickly
points to pride
OR
We feel we don’t deserve it so we don’t ask for it every day,
which points to a poor realization of who God is.
Both are equally destructive because they keep the individual in a
constant state of motion without a constant presence of force. One day the
machine just stops, it just turns off. There are some laws that even the most
villainous cannot escape.
And so we look down at the dashboard and see the “Fuel Needed” light
on and just pray we can make it far enough to reach the gas station closest to
the destination instead of reaching the next closest station.
We miss the forest for the
trees. We are so focused on the eventual that we miss the immediate and it
is in the immediate that Grace and Mercy are born anew each day. And I’d push
it a bit further to say that like the Manna given to the children of Israel, it
perishes with the setting sun. The question is, “What if the Grace and Mercy
you needed for today slips away?”
