Our Daily Grace

I just needed a pair of new running shoes.  Instead of buying online, I decided to purchase them at a non-franchised local running store.  The young man fitted me with what he thought best for my foot, although they did not have the width I usually wore.  "Give these a try," he said.  "If they don't work, you can bring them back."

After a few days of wearing them inside, the shoes still didn't feel right. I wanted to try a pair in my usual width.  I returned to the store.  An older salesman greeted me.  He did not have my size in the store, but he said he could order me a pair for an $8 shipping fee with a $20 non-refundable deposit.

I did the math. "So if you order me the other size and it does not fit, I would be out $28?" He just smiled and nodded his head. To make a long and difficult story short, after the owner came over, the clerk finally agreed to waive the extra fees and order the shoes.

As I exited the store, I felt uneasy.  That older clerk had been just plain ornery.  He made a simple purchase a lot harder than it needed to be.  He didn't treat me right. Just about all the way home, I justified my feelings, reciting every insult and injury.  And that bitter taste grew worse.

When I arrived home, I put on my OLD worn-out shoes and went for a run in the heat of the day. There is nothing like a good sweaty uphill run to calm the savage emotional beast in me.  Because on those runs, God meets me for a real workout.

Before the first bend in the road, I realized those nasty feelings were nothing other than sin. My sin, not the clerk's, not anyone else's but mine.  I have learned in the past that when a tsunami of justifications rise to the occasion, hmmmm, that would be my pride.  How do I know?  Grace responds.  Pride reacts. Insults, injury and injustice  just don't stick to grace.

Fill me, O LORD, with the grace needed for the task today.
Even in what appears the most ordinary errand of all.

I was hit out of the blue with an opportunity to practice grace in this, even in this. And I almost missed it.
I thought I just needed a pair of running shoes.
What I really needed was
                                    a new heart.

Give us this day
        our daily grace.

...desiring to act honorably
            in all things.

                 Hebrews 13.18

The 20th Mile

Just a few days ago, I started back to running again.  Tendonitis in my foot derailed me for these past eighteen months. It was not physical therapy that cured it.  But like so many things in life, healing just took time.

I am starting from scratch.  Back to kindergarten, as if I had never run before.  And oh, those first steps are harder than I remembered.  Yesterday, as I sweated my way on the path, something in my efforts felt very familiar.  I had gone just the equivalent of several blocks, but it was exactly what the 20th mile in a marathon feels like, pushed to the limit with another 6.2 miles to go to the finish line.  "I can't do this."   But as I have found my strategy with any difficult endeavor, take just one step more and then another.

That is all it takes: one step and then another.

When I started running about fifteen years ago, one of our daughters set my watch to beep every two minutes.  I would run two minutes and then walk two minutes.  I couldn't think about actually running for twenty minutes, but two?  I could do two minutes.  That was all I had to think about.  Just get through two minutes.  That piece was within my realm of possibility. I would slug through two minutes, catch my breath by walking two minutes, and then try to run a little bit more.  No need for speed.  No need to calculate distance.  Just go two minutes.

At that time, I was encouraged by the story of another woman who started to run.  Embarrassed by her attempts, she headed out to run when there was no one around.  And if a car happened to approach, she would stop and look as if she was admiring someone's garden or a field of wildflowers.  Slowly, she continued to run a little further, a little faster, a little longer distance, despite her trepidations.  That woman was Joanie Benoit Samuelson, who won the gold medal in the 1984 Olympics, the first year the women's marathon was introduced.

Her story as a runner began by just getting out the door.

I no longer have the watch that beeps, indeed these days I am not even wearing a watch.  But I am taking it one step at a time and then another.  I don't have to go the whole route, but hey, I can make it to the next tree, or that light post, or another driveway or two, and then to the next bend in the road.  It may feel like a 20th mile, but it is still just one step followed by another.

And it may not be about running at all, but work, relationships, family, and life itself.

I don't know what "20th mile" impossible situation you are facing today, nor can I fully know what is coming down the pike in my day, but we can take one step into it, and then another.

Let's run, friend.

In the middle of the night

It could have been the sound of the air conditioner cycling on, or our next door neighbor's sprinkler clicking against the metal fence, or any number of barely imperceptible possibilities.  But quite suddenly last night in the darkness, I came up to the surface, no longer asleep.

I often wake before dawn and take advantage of the early morning quiet to read, think, and write. As I turned over to check the time, it was far too early even for that.  The numbers 2.42 am on the face of the digital clock just seemed to mock me. I turned over and attempted to go back to sleep to no avail. The minutes slugged by like so many tired runners at the back of a race.  I felt like one of them.  

I tried my trusty right side, I tried my left side, I snuggled on my stomach with my feet hanging off the end of the bed, that which is usually a sure-fire way to lull me back to sleepy-land.  Still the numbers on the clock flowed by like a lazy river.

I turned on my back and tried the covers on, and then, the covers off.  I even tried reciting Psalm 23 really really slowly.  I chuckled when I came to the part, "He makes me lie down in green pastures."  My brain was still on hyper-speed.  I was like a toddler with too much sugar in her system.

In the classic children's book Madeleine is one of my favorite lines, "And in the middle of the night, Miss Clavel turned on the light, and said, "Something is not right."

In past episodes of not sleeping, I have been distracted by anxieties and fears and the totally annoying impulse of how to fix a situation outside of my control.

But last night, there appeared a different urgency in my 3 am alertness. What was keeping me awake?  I did not turn on the light like Miss Clavel, but I listened.  For just a moment, I ceased my struggle to find the "just right" position to return to sleep, and I listened.  Not for the creaking of a dark and empty house, a possible intruder or an imaginary ravenous lion under my bed, but for God.  Not posing a desperate plea for sleep, but holding forth a question, "What, God?" Not "WHY AM I STILL AWAKE?" But, "What for?"

And slowly, the names of loved ones came into my mind, like a crowd already standing in line, people whom I had been praying for in desperate situations, sweet friends and acquaintances I hadn't thought about in a long time, fellow believers whom I do not know who are suffering persecution, and even those who are persecuting them that they would come to know God.

The names, the faces, the situations, scrolled through my thoughts like the credits at the end of a movie.  For some, I lingered a little longer, knowing that they are facing dismay in a hundred different sizes.  I must have hit the right name somewhere in the lineup, because at one point shortly after 4.44, I could feel sleep begin to cover me like a warm silent wave at the beach.

On mornings after a short night like that, I repeat the prayer of my sweet friend Nancy, "LORD, make it enough."

My first cup of coffee was still more than half-full when, during the course of a phone call, I heard about someone I had prayed for just a few hours prior.

"That is why I woke you up," I felt like God saying to me.  I needed to pray, right then and there.  If I had waited until morning, it probably would not have even occurred to me.

And oh, what I would have missed.  Not that things changed because I prayed, but God allowed me to join Him in whatever it is He is doing. It is not that God needs me, but I clearly need Him.

In his book Prayer, author and pastor Timothy Keller states, "Through prayer, which brings heaven into the ordinary, we see the world differently, even in the most menial and trivial daily tasks.  Prayer changes us."

...and one of His disciples said to Him,

        "Lord, teach us to pray."

                                Luke 11.1

The reality of it

It was a strange and lonely year.  With great excitement, all my friends had left to start their freshmen year in college.  I was living at home, attending classes at a community college, and working two part-time jobs to cover my expenses.

This was not what I would have chosen.  It was not at all what I wanted.  But this was what my reality looked like for this year.  There was no money for me to go away to school.  My dad, finding himself suddenly unemployed, had been trying for a couple of years now to cobble together a new business.  Mom was teaching violin lessons in our living room to keep things running.

But in this hard situation, I was not without choices.  God had given me this year for a reason.  What was I going to do with what I had?  I could not change my circumstances, but I could change my attitude towards them. 

With my jobs, classes and schoolwork, "busy" was an understatement.  Bored was not an issue.  It was not a matter of filling up this empty year, but letting God use it for His purposes, even that which I could not know.

Very clearly to me -- even now-- God's Word redeemed that time.  It increased my awareness, not just about Him, but everything around me.  He showed me not just to put up with what I couldn't control, but to live expectantly within it, letting Him fulfill my time right then and there, and actually equipping me for what was next.  God enlarged my vision as a result.  It changed what could have easily been a dismal year of  "God, why couldn't I have gone to college like everyone else?" to a year of listening and to a renewed sense of His Presence.

This morning, the words of Psalm 100 reminded me of His faithfulness that year.  I had a 45 minute drive each way to classes and sometimes a longer journey to my job in the urban core.  My car did not even have a radio.  And so, I memorized scripture on those commutes.  Psalm 100 was one of those passages.

When I began reading it this morning, the words of this Psalm --memorized so very long ago -- rose up and embraced me with sweet familiarity, not just words of rote, but words of reality.  It was the year when I moved from believing the LORD to knowing Him in a new dimension, a year redeemed, a heart changed.

Make a joyful noise to the LORD,
                               all the lands!
Serve the LORD with gladness!
Come into His Presence with singing!
Know that the LORD is God!
It is He that made us, and we are His;
we are His people,
and the sheep of His pasture.
Enter His gates with thanksgiving,
       and His courts with praise!
Give thanks to Him,
                     bless His name!
For the LORD is good;
His steadfast love endures for ever,
and His faithfulness
                to all generations.

                    Psalm 100

What comes up out of the ground

When we moved yet again last summer, one of the last deeds at our old house was the carrying out of a long-established family tradition.  It was not a formal ceremony, but a physical action to reflect an invisible grace.  We were moving on again.  Another family would live in this house.  There would be a new name on the mailbox, another entity in the neighborhood, a different presence on the block.  God led us here for His divine purposes for a season. And now, it was time to move on again.

Our tradition, which was established so many moves ago, was to dig up a portion of the irises that grew in our yard. We filled a discarded box with some of the gnarly dirt-encrusted bulbs.  And we left behind a perennial garden of purple and gold blooms in the spring.  The new homeowners will not realize these flowers have a story behind them, but just enjoy the beauty left behind.

The original bulbs were not even original themselves, but were transplanted into my grandmother's yard by an unnamed aunt, when my mom was just a ten-year-old girl back in 1929.  This aunt thought that she was just sharing bulbs from her own garden.  Little did she know that she was planting a visible faithfulness that bloomed through the decades. She could not have foreseen the deep hardships just around the corner, the onset of the Great Depression that started just months later, the early debilitation and demise of my mom's father when she was just a teenager, and the devastating news of my mom's first husband who disappeared on a mission over Nazi Germany.

And each spring, the flowers continued to emerge out of the dirt and bloom with glory year after year.

As a young war widow, my mother moved to New York to perform as a violinist on early television.  When she married my father, my widowed grandmother relocated from her home in Texas to New York to take care of the pack of grandchildren who soon followed.  And when my grandmother uprooted her own life, she also dug up a portion of those irises to plant where to her must have seemed a foreign land.

Each time the family moved, my grandmother not only transplanted those iris bulbs, she created a garden, no matter the soil, no matter the rocks, no matter that she hobbled with rheumatoid arthritis for nearly fifty years. She left behind beauty wherever she went....and a patch of purple and gold irises that still bloom.

When my mom and dad moved for a final time, my husband and I filled a box with those iris bulbs.  We have both planted and transplanted the irises, carrying them with us to each of our new locations, not just as a sign of moving on, not just as a legacy left behind, but an intentional rooting wherever God leads us.

This morning, the irises bloomed, a visible manifestation of the faithfulness of God wherever we have moved. When I saw them in the early light, it was as if God was saying, "Put down your roots.  Thrive here, no matter the soil, no matter if just a season or the rest of your life. Let Me use this place, this situation, in your life and the lives of everyone around you.  You are here for a reason."

You will never know the impact of God working through you.
Plant His faithfulness here.

But this I call to mind,
and therefore I have hope:
The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases,
His mercies never come to an end;
they are new every morning;
great is Your faithfulness.

                     Lamentations 3. 21-23