The most vivid memory I have of my childhood is my best friend and I playing restaurant in my kitchen with my mom watching us. At the age of 4, my mom would let us bring her fake food back and forth to the table and give us a good plastic money tip and we would be thrilled at how good our service was.
When we got old enough to start bringing real food to my mom, things got messier. I remember when my parents refinished the floors in our kitchen and they were in love with how they turned out. The day we got to start walking on them, my friend and I were bringing my mom orange juice when, as careful as most 6 year olds are, we knocked over the entire container.
Even when you’re 6, you know when you’ve messed up. The same feeling will stick with you at any age. The sinking feeling in your stomach that you just did something that changes your course.
The memory ends with my mom cleaning up a spilled carton of orange juice and nothing else. She wasn’t mad and she didn’t yell, she cleaned up and we helped and the day went on. We even still got our plastic tip. I can recall both of my parents having the same reaction, “It’s just juice and they’re just floors. You’ll be more careful next time.” That is still the example I think of when I wrap my head around the concept of grace.
Now that I’ve grown up (physically, sometimes I doubt mentally), grace looks different in my life. At this age, grace looks a lot like me messing up very frequently, sometimes it feels like daily, and getting a lot of forgiveness for it. Grace looks more like me stumbling and God continuing to pick me up, no matter how many times it takes for me to see what I’m stumbling over. For a long time this frustrated me like nothing else I’d experienced. Continuing to make the same mistakes is the worst feeling in the world. It’s frustrating, it’s intimidating and it makes you make the kind of radical changes that no one wants to make; they’re forced to make them.
The kind of changes that grace leads to are soul-altering, life shaping changes that have results that matter, they really do, but they also come with hard mourning periods that can make you question a lot of things about your life. The best way to get through that period is to just free fall. Which sounds like terrible advice, I can admit that, but it’s completely true. The idea that free falling is a bad thing is a bad thing in and of itself; free falling is the best position you can be in. Whatever you land on is a brand new opportunity to pick yourself back up and restart your life. That’s exactly what’s extended to you through grace.
If you’re finding yourself in a free fall that you may or may not have been expecting, trust the process. It’s taking you somewhere. After all, it’s only orange juice.
