Not very long ago, I danced often with the idea; knowing; thinking that somehow everything in my life was hung on the same chord by a God who intently held the end of that line.  Who sent, for His reasons in His time… things, people, events, understandings… my way.

 

I sat again with my counselor, dabbing soggy regret and angst from my cheeks with Kleenex.  “I think…”  “I think if I am really honest that I am angry at the church,”  “… and angry at God.”

 

“What is this notion…”   fell from my mouth mingled together with choky tears, “of grace?”  “ Does it mean that my family and my life have fallen out of its/His path?”  “ Does it mean that the children born in or dying in Zambia or other third world countries of aids, starvation and disease are somehow exempt from the notion of it?”  Grace…

 

“And I have narrated a thousand times the words that now stab through my own chest like daggers of ice…” “There, but for the grace of God, go I.”

 

Now, that I find myself on the other side of that I… what is the implication of this notion for me?  For my daughters?  For we who stand on the other side of some sign, or circumstance or set of choices that leave us…isolated; without the warm fuzzy blankets of a safe family, home, religion or whatever validates our hierarchy?   Are they…we, any less in the line of this… notion of grace, now that our worlds have been turned belly up and realism and survival are the attitudes of the day?  And who are the determiners of where that line is, what it looks like, and how it is translated. 

 

I used to believe that I knew.  It was as if I felt God palpably looking down at me on any given moment.  As if I heard him whispering to me always…” you are chosen.”    Now, I am challenged to look past the minute significance of my own existence and wonder how and why it would only be applicable… to me.

 

I have felt the internal sting from the silent gazes peering at me from the safe places.  I have felt the rub of how the contrast of my pain and misfortunes have made others feel cozy and “blessed.”  I have been a participant in the dogmatic translation of that…which I realize my limited intelligence had no business speaking to with any level of authority or guarantee. This notion…

 

He shrugged his shoulders, and admitted to having no answer.  And that; the honesty of not knowing all the answers; the genuineness of being humans incapable of fully comprehending and construing the divine.  Though no more settling; that I could live with…felt in some way itself to be…a notion of grace.