Harvesting Grace

Hands pick up dew-kissed apples as sun warms my breeze-swept face. Brushing leaves off of fallen fruit, I'm reminded that the dying is where the living can be born. The falling is where the rising can begin. And I ask myself if, in my falling, I'm letting myself be transformed by all this suffering. 

Can grace change a broken narrative? 

Squirrel cheeps in nearby tree and I reach up, pluck fall-harvest from the apple tree. My thoughts run back to something I stumbled on earlier in the week while sitting with His Word, trying to find hope in a world gone wild. In a heart still heavy with grief. My eyes had landed on a passage in John 9 where Jesus heals a blind man, and I realize that this might hold the key to helping me to understand how to be a broken gift. 

The first question the crowd had asked Jesus was whether the man or his parents has sinned that he was born blind. They assumed that his suffering was punishment from God for something wrong. 

And just maybe today, we still assume that all suffering is bad, too? 

Jesus had then addressed them and said that it was neither the man's fault or that of his parents that this had happened. Rather, it was allowed "so that the works of God might be displayed in him." 

I place apple in bag and feel my own soul-blindness lift as I see that humanity today is still struggling to accept the hidden blessing of adversity. Somehow still thinks that either God has gone wrong or we've gone wrong that all this broken exists. Still looks for the blaming way instead of the surrendered, holy way. 

I stare up at the mountain-view in front of me and pause.

Sometime earlier, I had called an elderly friend. Made myself do the hard thing because hard things are what make up this life. Cancer ravages her body, time ticks away by the minute and I realize I've little time left to tell her that I love her. But she reminds me that the place she's going for eternity is so, so much better. That she has peace. That she isn't going to miss the trouble of all this world. Somehow, I have to agree. Yet I'll miss her.

"My peace I give to you, not as the world gives..."

I had hung up the phone and asked God how to once again see this as grace. I steel myself for yet another impending goodbye. When all that appears to be evident in this world is more brokenness, I ask God if somehow He'd allow me to see it all the way He sees it. To have the eye-view of Heaven instead of the vision of earth. To somehow trust that all this pain that could be stopped is yet allowed and even ordained so that the works of God can be made evident in the hearts of the being-sanctified.

I have broken vision. What I need is a re-vision. A new way to see things. 

I acknowledge to myself that this world is simply too hard. That there is no way in any way that I have what it takes to bear the lot I've been assigned. I have no way to rise above these soul-ashes and call it grace. I have run out of courage to believe. I need Someone to believe for me. To believe in who I can become out of all this. To believe that Christ in me is sufficient for me.

Perhaps I need to be reminded that I don't have what it takes for this life, but I know a God who does. A God for whom all this broken isn't too much. A God whose heart can feel the pain of our hearts yet still believe in the pain's ability to do us good. 

I breathe in deep. Cool, crisp fall air rushes into my lungs. My ears open to the sounds of life around me. And I feel myself warm.

I preach it to my aching heart: in this world, trials will abound, but your Lord has called you to take heart because He has overcome it all. He is over it all. 

Perhaps our real comfort might come from knowing that there is an Overcomer who fights for us and for whom our sorrows aren't too great to bear. That, though our brokenness be abundant, His grace is  even more so. 

There. Is. Enough. In. God. For. All. This. 

I come back to the simple fact that God has made a sovereign choice to not remove our pain in this life because comfort isn't what He's after. Holiness is. Neither the blind man nor his parents nor even God Himself was at fault for his blindness. God simply had a hidden plan that only the man's blindness could reveal. He could not testify to God's power without being powerless first. Could not know God's strength without first knowing his own weakness.

Grace inverts all we know and turns it upside-down so that it becomes right-side up. While we would often choose to run from discomfort, Christ teaches us that this is rather how we most change and become like Him. Because He could've avoided the cross. He even asked His heavenly Father for another way. But God said this was the only way. And Christ obeyed. There could be no resurrection without first a suffering, a death. 

There can be no new beginning without first an ending. No life without a dying. 

In all this heart-breaking, can I allow myself to be shaped more like Christ out of the very things that threaten to be my soul's undoing?

I gather apple-bags, harvest in hands full. A few rotting ones dot the leave-strewn lawn and I see the cycle once again: unless a seed goes into the ground and dies, it cannot bear fruit. Unless a heart, a life, is broken and surrendered, it cannot be a gift. 

I'm thankful for neighbor sharing her bounty, and I walk back home, counting grace.