Just Grateful

 

Dear Old Friend,

In a way, for me, Easter Week is more like the end of the old year and the beginning of the new one than New Years. The life, death and resurrection of Jesus are what everything else in my world revolves around. That sounds so holy of me, doesn’t it? It’s really not.  I recently told another friend that the reason I am so consumed by grace is because I know how utterly hopeless I am without it.  I think you can probably measure the depth of one’s perceived guilt by the degree of his or her desperation for grace. Anyway, that’s true enough for me.

Since my life in retail has kept me from ever being able to spend the actual New Year’s holiday with family outside of my local area, it has been such a blessing for me to spend this special week with my daughter and son-in-law, getting acquainted with my brand new baby grandson and having lots of time to play with my three year old grandson; a Grammie’s dream! I have no proufound thoughts to share this week. It’s just that having this time to reflect has made me grateful.

I’m grateful for this Grace Pilgrimage on which God has led me for about 35 years.  I went from thinking I was so slow that I must be the last person on the planet to grasp the concept of grace, to thinking that Steve Brown was the only other person who saw what I saw in scripture and that maybe we were both crazy; and then he was taken off the radio in my area!  Thankfully, God gave me beacons of grace along the way; pastors whose light shone on my path just long enough to keep me heading in the right direction, and who then moved on.

I’m grateful that God opened the door for a ministry to the teens in my church, and that I was allowed to use scripture as my “curriculum”, which motivated me to study in order to teach what I found.  Those precious kids went on my pilgrimage with me, and I can only hope that I blessed their lives even a fraction as much as I was blessed by every single one of them over the years!

I’m grateful that God kept my own children from being completely driven away from him by my terribly imperfect parenting. I sometimes fear that the only thing I modeled well was a parent’s desperate need for grace in the face of failures; I’m still modeling that and praying that God will use it somehow, even now.

I’m grateful for the precious friends, like you, which God has placed in my life, who know me, warts and all, and who will drop everything to pray for me and encourage me when I am side-tracked by fear and doubt, and for whom I can do the same.

I’m also grateful for the new and growing group of friends I am discovering through social media, who share my same passion for the Good News: That when God said, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased”, he feels the same way about me, because I am in Christ; and, that when Jesus said “It is Finished” he meant it! What a blessing to not feel alone anymore and to have access to the constant banquet of their new insights and understandings which they excitedly share throughout each day. Such encouragement!

But, most of all, of course, I’m grateful for my Lord and Savior, who saw my hopeless plight, the plight of us all, and came to do everything for us because we could not do anything for ourselves. He became for us our righteousness, holiness and redemption (1 Cor.1:30).  He became sin for us so that we could become the righteousness of God. (2 Cor. 5:21).  He lifted me out of my 'This for That' world into his economy of 'Everything for Nothing'. He does not demand anything from me in return for his priceless gift; and, because of that, I want to give him every frail and feeble part of me to use as he sees fit.

Hallelujah, what a Savior! Happy Easter!

Love Always,

Bonnie