Coded Grace

Sitting there before the window, I’m struck.

All these years I was saved. I had said my yes to God, but I was really living the no.

I may have always known that change takes real intentionality, like a woman bent over her garden beds every day with a spade and the determined will to grow up something good to strengthen the heart.

I may even have known that change requires more than merely thinking the warm and fuzzy thoughts about a door and a way through and that Greek word, eucharisteo, holding the mystery to the full life and ever after.

But none of that at all meant that I knew what to do.

To live — at all — I needed to know.

I begin the list. Not of gifts I want, but of gifts I already have. That is the beginning, and I smile. I can’t believe how I smile. I mean, they are just the common things, and maybe I don’t even know they are gifts, really, until I write them down and see what they look like.

Writing the list, it makes me feel … happy. All day. I can hardly believe how it does that, that running stream of consciousness, river I drink from and am quenched in, a surging stream of grace and it’s wild how it sweeps me away. And I add one more to the list. To feel it all again. I can’t understand why it does that. And yet … too … the list, it feels foreign, strange. Long, I am a woman who speaks but one language, the language of the fall — discontentment and self-condemnation, the critical eye and the never satisfied.

This thanks that I am doing — it seems so … crude. Trivial. If this list is the learning of the language of eucharisteo — this feels like … guttural groanings. But perhaps the “full of grace” vocabulary begins haltingly, simply, like a child, thankful for the childlike.

But doesn’t the kingdom of heaven belong to such as these?

At first, it’s the dare that keeps me going. That and how happy it makes me — giddy — this list-writing of all that is good and pure and lovely and beautiful. But what keeps me going is what I read in that Bible lying open on my prayer bench looking out the window to the snow fort. The fort with a door in the wall. It’s Paul writing his letter to the Philippians. I read the fourth chapter. I almost don’t see it, but Paul repeats it twice in only two sentences, so I don’t miss it.

There it is — the secret to living joy in every situation, the full life of eucharisteo. Twice Paul whispers it: “I have learned …” Learned. I would have to learn eucharisteo. Learn eucharisteo — learn it to live fully. Learn it like I know my skin, my face, the words on the end of my tongue. Like I know my own name. Learn how to be thankful — whether empty or full. Could the list teach me even that hard language? Over time?

I want the hunt, the long sleuth, the careful piecing together. To learn how to be grateful and happy, whether hands full or hands empty. That is a secret worth spending a life on learning.

I wake the next morning and I grip my pen, ink, to crack the code.

God, so many days have dialects I don’t understand. How in the world do I learn the language of joy? One can only crack the code of contentment by learning the language of Your love. Let me count the ways.