Awakening to this gift of God and receiving it in all its mystery gives us peace with God and moves us toward peace with one another. Grace doesn’t fix all our problems, but it turns them all into opportunities for beauty to erupt. The reason for that is we begin attending to where God is present in our “problems,” and trusting that God has something to say if we will listen.
Encountering and awakening to God’s gift of grace comes with an invitation to follow and be formed by grace. While not pontificating or shaming, grace is demanding. Like the potter’s hand on a lump of clay, grace wants to lead to something. Recently, our Bishop Ken Carter put it this way. “Grace wants to lead us to more opportunity, more equality, more flourishing, more patience, more justice, more covenant-keeping, more hope, more and deeper followers of Jesus; and said differently, less unfairness, less judgmentalism, less prejudice, less violence, less despair, less hunger, less racism, less sexual harassment, less mimicking of unhealthy patterns of behavior that we see in the world.”