Grace is Awesome (if I'm the Recipient)

Yesterday I ended up in Charlottesville, VA.   Wasn’t planning to go there.  Of course, with my life, there’s always a story.  

Dominyk was returning home after 7 months of trying to make it on his own.   If you know the story, Dominyk was warned that if he chose to leave without our blessing, it would be really hard for us to let him back home.  But when he was facing homelessness during a cold Minnesota winter and his Plan A was to live in a car and Plan B to move into an ice house, we decided it was time to let him move back home.  It kinda goes back to our parenting philosophy of erring on the side of grace.  So we helped him get a bus ticket to Lynchburg (He paid for most of it).    

So why did I end up in Charlottesville?  He fell asleep and didn’t get off the bus in Lynchburg!  So I had already driven an hour to Lynchburg from the Brookneal townhouse by 7 a.m.  I sat and waited for the bus to unload, nothing.  I tried another part of the bus station, a very congested thin alley, and nothing — except for a large cinder post that I managed to smash into.  Sigh.  My poor Equinox has a trauma history with all things Dominyk.  But I digress.    

So I called the Charlottesville Greyhound station and asked that when the bus arrived there if someone could go in and make sure he was awake and tell him I would come there to get him.  

I drove another hour and fifteen minutes, picked him up and then 2.5 to get back to Danville.   The whole trip our conversation made me realize a truth about human nature:  When we are the recipients of grace it’s awesome — but we still may not think others are worthy of it.  (Which seems completely odd, because the whole point of grace is that we are not worthy of it.)  He spent half of the trip ranting about Wilson’s bad choices and how Wilson can’t use his trauma history as an excuse for his behavior.    In attempting to instruct him, I turned it around (gently even) to ask if the same harsh judgments applied to him.  I smiled as he went on to do what most of us do — he went on to explain that grace, mercy and kindness was a really good thing when it applied to him.  But to Wilson?  Not so much.  We talked through it and Dominyk realized that maybe he needed to be a little more gracious and confessed that sometimes he just likes to rant about stuff for a really long time.  (Self-awareness moment!)  

Remember the parable of the merciless servant found in Matthew 18?  There’s this dude that gets forgiven of a huge debt — he is shown so much grace and mercy.  And yet as soon as he is forgiven he heads out and finds a guy who owes him a fraction of what the debt that was just forgiven.  He demands that he pay him — Choking him, and sending him off to prison. 

 It’s not hard to see Jesus’ point in this parable.  All of us have been forgiven of so much and yet we don’t want to offer that grace to others.   As we begin the near, I’m challenging myself to look at others through the eyes of mercy and grace.   Let’s assume the best in those around them, give them the grace and mercy we want to receive from them, and I guarantee things will go better… because it really is true that grace wins every time.