Personal Reflection on Grace

Please bear with me I promise that I will get back to the story momentarily. I would guess that I am stalling to stay away from the pain!

 Since my writing is called “The Grace Papers” I suppose I should define what it is I am speaking about.  I had a Grandmother named Grace and I have a great niece named Bailey Grace. Obviously I am not writing about them. Though they both have fine stories that deserve to be told, but they certainly don’t deserve to be pulled into the pain of mine.

Throughout my life I have had some pretty weird ideas about grace. When were hyper-Pentecostal we used to hear people say “watch out! Don’t go too far with that grace message”.  People wrongly equate grace with sloppiness, or permissiveness, just like people wrongly equate Godliness with dress. I remember in about 1998 I began to be challenged by one of my good friends. 

I met Bill Finch in the summer of 1990. We were in Lewiston ID doing “Street Evangelism” on the weekends. Bill was walking the streets talking to young people about God’s love. He carried a guitar and occasionally sang a song as he walked the streets.  Bill and I became friends, we were (and still are) bound by commitment to Christ, honesty, and we shared a common experience of God miraculously reaching out to us to lead into the redemption story. Religious people don’t like Bill, but his friendship is dear to me. An intellectual even as a teenager we continually challenged each other with revelation and doctrine.

Years later Bill opened a coffee shop in Lewiston. People met in “Blackbird Java” in an informal setting called “the gathering”.  It was unlike any “church” that I had ever seen. What really impressed me was the transparency. Bill and the rest of the crowd were brutally honest. Openly speaking of sin they were struggling with.  Wow, if people told the truth like this in a traditional church setting they would be ostracized, and excommunicated.  But I found in honesty there is freedom!   

Judgment is a funny animal. Paul (who happens to be good friend of mine, because I have spent lots of time with him) said that we judge someone we do it because the same sin lives in us. As freedom becomes prevalent, I become a lot less likely to judge. It’s odd as it seems it would be the other way around. The more I walk in righteousness it would seem that I would have the right to judge. The opposite is true. Self righteousness is prideful, ugly and mean.

I don’t want to judge, I would rather love. I desire to look with the eyes of the Father, the eyes of Grace.

I learned this from Bill, or perhaps we learned it together.