I have had several conversations about God’s grace over the last several months so I wanted to share this common analogy that God’s grace is like a river.  

My family goes tubing every year on the Ichetucknee River.  I love to get there early and start from the midway point so we beat the crowd that is starting from the top. We can spend an hour or more in peace and semi-quiet just enjoying the river and nature.  

That is one of the images I have for God’s grace.  When we are doing the will of God we are carried along in peace.  We know that trouble will come in the way of rapids, but if we really trust God we will know how to handle those rapids because we have been training to do so.  

We Spend a Lot Of Energy Fighting God’s Grace

I don’t know about you, but most of my life I have been a swimmer.  Trying to fight the current and swim upstream.  Trying to swim straight across the river and getting tired before I made it halfway.  Or, I would see the rapids coming and didn’t trust God to get me through them.  

The rapids of life will come, we can’t avoid them.  Our challenge is not to avoid them, it is to trust our gear (Gods grace) to get us through them.  I’m not saying that God puts the rapids there.  People are people, and we are fallen.  People make bad choices, our bodies break down, and things just happen.  

We Can Go Against God’s Will

God gives us free will and many times it is through free will that bad things happen.  We make bad choices like spending our paycheck on drugs, eating terribly and not exercising, or marrying a spouse who does those things expecting to change him or her.  

Many times our first thought, when bad things happen, is to blame God.  God is not sitting around just waiting to cause something bad to happen to us.  Cars break down, spouses leave, and people die. So instead of blaming God, we trust him to give us the strength to get through these times.  Jesus even says that there will be bad times in your life but if you trust Him, He will help you get through it. (John 16:33, Matthew 11:28-30)

I have a friend who wrote a song called, Standing in the River. (Regrettably, it has never been published)  He talks about how it only took a moment to make the wrong choice and change his life.  It also only takes another moment to make the choice to let God in to help us get through the rough waters of life.  God isn’t going to barge in.  He stands at the door and patiently knocks. (Revelation 3:20)

Travelers on the Journey

By the time my family gets done with our first run on the Ichetucknee, the crowd is building and if we decide to go down the river a second time we can do it with hundreds of our closest friends.  At the beginning of our journey on the river of God’s grace, we may seem alone.  The longer we stay on the river the more people we will meet who are going our way. 

I am currently rereading, The Spirituality of Imperfection (Amazon Link) by Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham.  First, because it’s a pretty good book.  But also because I might have skimmed it the first time, and I’m trying to learn what they are saying.  So where better to start than at the beginning.

No One Is Perfect

Spirituality begins with the acceptance that our fractured being, our imperfection, simply is: There is no one to “blame” for our errors–neither ourselves nor anyone or anything else. Spirituality Helps us first to see, and then to understand, and eventually accept the imperfection that lies at the core of our human be-ing.

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I have never wanted to see myself as I am.  I had pictures of who I thought I was.  A failure.  A Fat kid.  Lazy.   I also never believed I should make a mistake.  When I did I knew I was a failure and cursed myself for it.  

All those terrible self-thoughts shoved God out of my life.  I lived to be the victim.  I always thought I was in control but I’m not.  I wanted to play God because I thought I could do a better job.  Controlling everyone around me manipulating friends and coworkers.  Inserting myself into situations so I could look like I was the savior for the day.  

I’m Not Who I Thought I Was

The core paradox that underlies spirituality is the haunting sense of incompleteness, of being somehow unfinished, that comes from the reality of living on this earth as part and also as non-part of it.  For to be human is to be incomplete, yet yearn for completion; it is to be uncertain, yet long for certainty; to be imperfect, yet long for perfection; to be broken yet crave wholeness.  All of these yearnings remain necessarily unsatisfied, for perfection, completion, certainty, and wholeness are impossible precisely because we are imperfectly human–or better, because we are perfectly human, which is to say humanly imperfect.

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Through the Grace of God and a new understanding of who I am, I know that is all a lie.  But I spent years blaming my mother, my circumstances, my job, the list goes on; for my screwups.  I hated myself and God helped me finally see that everyone makes mistakes, everyone fails and a failure isn’t the end of the world.  Until I was willing to take advice and let God change me none of that could happen.

I’m not a whole person and that’s okay.  Where I end, God begins today.  I am a good person who has made mistakes.  Today my yearnings are not for wealth or power but for more of God and I never understood that before.  I do understand that I’m not perfect and neither are you, but with God, we can be whole.  God loves us no matter what and all He has ever wanted is a relationship with all of us.