Amazing Grace

Grace...what a terrifying, amazing, nonsensical, freeing, all-encompassing, nondiscriminatory word. A word that most days doesn't make any sense to my tiny brain. I try to look at grace from a human perspective and I see it as saying I forgive you when you wrong me, but you better not do it again. Or I know you didn't mean to hurt me, so I'll let this one slide, but the next time you won't get off so easy. It's a word that we almost have to bring down to our level because anything beyond that would terrify and confuse us to our utter soul. but when we do bring it down to our level we tend to reject it because we don't and can't understand it.
There are many days that go by that I either don't thing about grace or I reject the notion of it completely. But I was sitting in a coffee shop the other day and it just kinda hit me, I started to have a mini panic attack about how screwed-up I am and about all the ways I have hurt God and others and I began to think about this word that is often thrown around in the Christian community with little understanding or acknowledgment of what it really means. I was watching "Rachel Getting Married" the other day. (I watch a lot of movies nowadays because I gave up TV for Lent, maybe it's a loophole, but it's one I'm and I'm pretty sure God is okay with) Anyways, the movie is about a girl who is more or less a colossal screw-up, she (Anne Hathaway) has been in and out of rehab for 10 years after inadvertently killing her younger brother in a car accident because she was high. This event leading to a lot of the reasons as to why she can't get her life together. Anyways at one point in the story she's talking about the accident and she made a poignant remark. She said that she can't forgive herself for what she did because she can't/doesn't want to believe in a God that can forgive her. That comment kinda struck me and rang true to my very own life. There have been times when I have royally screwed-up (no obviously I haven't killed anyone, but if all sins are viewed the same way by God, what does it matter) . I've done things that I never thought I would do, things I have judged other people for doing, and things I can't forgive myself for doing. And for me personally a lot of times it's easier to cling to our regret and self-loathing. I think there's a kind of comfort in it. We call it "life experience" or "an opportunity to grow or learn." And while sometimes that may be true and even something I believed and clung to for a long time, I'm slowly beginning to see that there are some things I have done that have no educational benefit to me. I knew they were mistakes going into them and yet I still willingly chose to make them, I knew they were stupid choices and yet I more or less blatantly turned my back on God and said we're gonna try this my way ( and most of us know how those decisions turn out...badly). They were stupid, impulsive, selfish decisions that simply prove my belief that I'm a self-centered, self-obsessed lover of this world.
It's these mistakes that I have a difficult time accepting grace for. I would rather bask in my self-righteousness and think "well at least I feel guilty about it, that puts me above about 98% of the population, right?" But in reality my thoughts of remorse and guilt end up eating me up and eventually they create a wedge between me and God. It makes me doubt His power and His love. It causes me to look at Him through my tiny, pathetic human lens. This perception that is incapable of understanding the depth of who God is
Who do I think I am to put limits on what God has done or is capable doing? But this is exactly what I do when I reject His grace, I put Him in a box that it easy for me to understand and comfortable for me to accept. It's funny because so often we are so scared of letting go of this all-consuming, weirdly comforting guilt, but when we do we are filled with this inexplicable freedom. We still know that we are terminally screwed-up, fallen people but we also know that we are a redeemed people. We can find hope in that even though we've made colossal irrevocable mistakes in the past. Christ came and wiped it all away. What an amazing, terrifying truth! Our past failures don't need to affect out current situations, they only affect us when we lose sight of the cross and begin to rely on our own disgraced humanity. Not only has Christ wiped our slate clean, He has given us the tools to overcome evil and temptation the next time it knocks on our door. The Holy Spirit walks with us and transforms and sanctifies us and gives up hope for a brighter, more obedient, Christ-filled future. I'm not saying we're never going screw-up again, because lets face it no matter how much we would prefer to deny it, we're still human and overcoming our fallen human nature is not something we'll experience this side of eternity, but the Holy Spirit makes us stronger, wiser, and more determined to walk in Christ's footsteps (sorry that is one massively long run-on sentence)
So right now I am clinging to the cross and trying to see the grace that God brings, not that humankind brings, because a life of guilt and self-loathing and endless failures is not what God calls us to, He calls us to a life filled with GRACE, hope, peace, and communion with Him, and we can't do or have those things if we are too wrapped up in our self-pity, because thank God that we are made new in Christ Jesus.