Colliding Grace

(Photo by Daniel Monteiro on Unsplash)

Sometimes the miracle is having the voice to scream, "Jesus!" at an octave you've never reached as you realize an SUV is about to plow into your door at 40 mph, and there is nothing you can do to stop it.

The miracle is picking a shard of glass out of your mouth as your gaze drops to the remnants of the window shattered across your lap, and the only cut on your body is the size of a pin prick on your pinkie. 

It is nothing less than miraculous watching your car leave the accident scene on the bed of a tow-truck as you walk over to a waiting car with nothing more than a twinge of discomfort in the muscles of your lower back.

Grace is a father who has no genetic relation to you dropping everything at work and running to his car as soon as he hears you say on the other end of the line "I was just in a car accident on [a slightly sketchy road]."

Grace comes in the wake-up call of a non-fatal/life-altering car accident caused by a risk you took, because you have too much on your plate again and that interferes with your ability to make good decisions.

Utter grace floods in when you choke down the humble pill labeled "Hansens DO make these kinds of mistakes" and receive in return countless stories of other accidents and poor driving decisions - including the story of the green Torino that your father, the best driver you ever knew, never told you.

I wish the miracle had come in the form of a supernatural push out of the way or a narrow miss or any sort of interference that would have prevented the accident from happening. I wish the grace of God had come rushing in to save me from the consequences of a series of poor choices. I wished it on Monday, and I still wish it now. And yet, in this season of all places, I should know something about collisions with grace and gritty miracles.

In Jesus, Emmanuel - the Hope of the world because He was God WITH us - the long-awaited rescue of mankind collided with the expectation of what that rescue would look like. The miracle was supposed to be deliverance from Roman oppression, not deliverance from death. It was supposed to be the Messiah sitting on the throne in Jerusalem again with the presence of God dwelling in the great temple restored once again to its former glory. And grace, I don't even know what grace was supposed to look like, but it sure wasn't an infant son of an unwed mother lying in a feeding trough.

For thousands of years, we as people have been misinterpreting the things we need. The Jews may have needed rescue from the Roman oppression, but their need for the life and freedom the gospel brought was far greater. Their desire for the temple to be rebuilt is mirrored in the heart of God, yet He desired to live inside them more than inside a majestic building. 

I thought I needed the day to go smoothly - the opportunity to sail through eleven hours of scheduled activities and responsibilities more than a day of rest. I thought I needed to take care of myself - that I couldn't afford to rely on the people around me because they wouldn't be there if I really needed them. 

Grace is only found in people unexpectedly meeting my needs in beautiful ways, not in the very need itself, right? 

Wrong. The truth is, in the midst of arthritic grief and the awkward dance of the holidays, the very thing I needed most was to be reminded that I wasn't alone. I ran headlong into the grace of that need before anyone stepped in to fill it like the time my teenage self sprinted back into a movie theater because my best friend had to pee at the worst possible moment and in the utter darkness ran smack dab into a man's chest. At first, there was just the collision: me, the other person, encountering each other in a quite unexpected and rather unwelcome manner.

Want to know a secret? I needed to collide with that grace.

I needed to experience the miracle of deliverance inside of something rather than deliverance from something.

That's the vision of Emmanuel from the cross, holding back the response to the jeers of soldiers telling him to call down the angels for deliverance. It's the final moment when, bruised and bloody and seemingly defeated, He says, "It is finished" only to rise again, holding the keys to the grave that tried to swallow Him. 

Where do you need to collide with grace this week?

It's probably not a pretty place. It might even be a place you haven't admitted exists in a while. I hope it doesn't come in quite as drastic of a form as my encounter with grace this week, but I hope it comes nonetheless. As the days of Christmas roll through, I hope you collide with the miracles of grace, followed by hope and peace and joy. May you be shaped more beautifully into His image in the process, bearers of the very grace that knocked you off your feet and sucked the wind out of you.

- J