I am always yearning for perfection.  I long for this battle to be done, for the result of a war won to become more evident.  I want my internal battle to be finished as well as the battle over this world of ours.  I get tired, you see, of fighting.  I want to love perfectly, to obey perfectly, to forgive perfectly.

 I want our world to be able to quit fighting.

 I want all of us to love perfectly, to love in a way that results in bodies getting fed, animals feeling safe, hearts being healed, trees growing tall.

I’m ready for the lion and the lamb to lie down together.

Yet if I had been born into perfection, I would never have experienced the gift that is grace.  This grace-gift of being loved at my most unlovable, of being shaped into perfection at my most imperfect.  Is it worth it?  A hard question.

If I had been perfect from the start, I wouldn’t know battle and I wouldn’t know mercy.  I would, perhaps, trust more in myself than in the One who made me.  Are heights of joy made richer by the depths carved by sorrow?

Grace is having a commitment to – or at least an acceptance of – being ineffective and foolish.  ~ Anne Lamott

I don’t know why this is so.  I don’t know why we can only experience grace while being ineffective and foolish.  I don’t know why we must experience battle in order to grasp this gift full of beauty.  I wish it were not this way.

I do know that God does nothing by accident.  I do know that God created with a purpose of love and I do know that someday His will shall be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Is grace worth all of this?

There is much that I don’t know.  And there are a few things I do.

Art credit: Illustration from Luther Bible 1769