So Much Grace

If you've been here around much, you've noticed there's an awful lot of grace stuff.

Maybe you wonder why I talk about it so. much.  "With a million perfectly good things to write about, why keep coming back to one subject?  Aren't you afraid people will get, you know, bored??"

I freely admit: I'm obsessed with grace.

It's on the spine of at least half-a-dozen of the books I own, shows up all the time in my blog posts and the songs playing on Pandora, is engraved on my ring and on my favorite necklace, and if I was a tattoo kind of girl (which, for the record, I'm not...needles), I'd have that word inked right across my forehead.

Back in 2011, when grace's dawn began to break in my soul, I was caught up in the sheer immensity of what I'd been missing my whole life.  As wonderful as those early months were, I was also terrified that it would all eventually become ordinary, that it would lose its wonder, its shiny newness, that one day I'd cease to be thrilled with what God had done.  I didn't want that to happen.  But doesn't newness always wear off?

Those fears make me throw my head back and laugh now.

You guys, I'm so in love.  Even more so now, if that were possible.

This former Pharisee heart of mine has been set free to live, but the memory of the old way is not gone.  I look back and I know what God has rescued me from - the depths of my self-effort and ugly pride and exhaustion.  It makes me all the more grateful.

And He has continued to flood my thirsty soul with grace, soaking down deeper and deeper into layers of belief and thinking.  The more I learn the more I see how much I have to learn.  Fear has been replaced with the elation of a little kid in a never-ending candy shop.

'Cause that's the thing about God's grace: it has no limits.  There's always, always more.  More to experience.  More to discover.  It never runs out or gets old.  And today, five years later, it amazes me - dazzles me - just as much as it did those first few months.

I can't help myself.  I'm going to talk and write and sing about it, because how can I not?

So much grace.  Too much grace to keep it inside.