“Blessed are you who hunger now, for you will be satisfied.” Luke 6:21
I have lived my entire life in a famine, and now I am being called to the table to feast. To feast on grace. I have spent my entire life starving myself of the most beautiful gift The Lord has given. I desire and expect perfection from both myself and the world around me and become consumed with frustration when faced with the brokenness and imperfection in both myself and the world.
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But God takes my judgement and unfair standards and gently reminds me that while He is just, the world is not. I have a deep seated and desperate need in my heart for everything in the world to be fair. To be just. To be right. And this comes from the Lord, because He is a just God, a righteous God, and in Heaven, everything will be just and fair and right. But in this world everything is broken. Everything is wrong. And I must allow Him to soften my heart with grace, rather than allow selfish and prideful anger to take over at every injustice. I allow myself to become angry and irritated when things are not right. I have allowed unfairness, from the fact that the parking situation at my apartment complex is less than ideal, to the babies I met in Nicaragua a few years ago who were starving, to my own short-comings to make my heart hard and angry. I hold people and the world and myself to the highest standard, and become disappointed and angry when my standard is not met. And I completely write off and neglect the most beautiful and important part of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. His complete and all-consuming grace.
His grace is perfect. And it covers everything. Every crack in our broken world is filled in by His grace. Yes, this world is broken. The cracks are everywhere. The shards of glass cutting all of us open day by day. But we have a good and perfect God that cannot stand to watch us all bleed out. So He came and bled instead. And now every injustice is submerged in grace.
What I am learning is that it is easy to walk in anger. It is easy to be hard-hearted. It is easy to hate the world because of its brokenness.
It is the hardest thing in the world to walk in consuming grace because it requires complete surrender. It requires acknowledging that He is the savior, not me. And it requires being soft hearted, and allowing the world to hurt you, trusting that He will heal every hurt.
Because I cannot be in step with the Lord when my heart is hard. There will always be a wall between Him and me when my heart is hard. Walking with the Lord requires me to have a constant broken heart. It requires me to constantly see injustice and allow it to hurt my heart the way that it hurts God’s. But it then requires me to to allow God to cover it in grace. I must not let it make me selfishly angry. I must trust that He is good and sovereign even when things are far from fair or good in this world.
So I choose to walk in grace. I choose to enjoy the five minute walk from my car to my apartment unit instead of being annoyed about it. I choose to believe in God’s power, and trust that all of the starving babies in the world will feast in Heaven. When someone wrongs me, I choose to look beyond my anger and instead see into their broken heart, their hurt that causes them to relate to the world in the way that they do.
I choose to give God all of the broken pieces of the world and my life instead of trying to catch them myself. He already bled so that I don’t have to. So that others don’t have to. I choose to feast on His grace, because I have been given in abundance. I choose to feast on His grace because that is what I am called to. I choose to feast on His grace because it is the only way I will ever live and walk in freedom.
We are not called to live in famine, we are called to feast. We are called to constant fullness of grace and peace and love. It is our choice whether or not we will take our place at the table, or whether we sill sit in the corner and slowly starve ourselves to death.
