Grace

Grace

Be careful! Watch out for attacks from the Devil, your great enemy. He prowls around like a roaring lion, looking for some victim to devour. Take a firm stand against him, and be strong in your faith. Remember that your Christian brothers and sisters all over the world are going through the same kind of suffering you are. In his kindness God called you to his eternal glory by means of Jesus Christ. After you have suffered a little while, he will restore, support, and strengthen you, and he will place you on a firm foundation.

1 Peter 5:8-10

Any mom who has ever felt despair will appreciate the following words from Lewis B. Smedes’ book How Can It Be All Right When Everything Is Wrong?

Grace does not make everything right. Grace’s trick is to show us that it is right for us to live; that it is truly good, wonderful even, for us to be breathing and feeling at the same time that everything clustering around us is wholly wretched. . . . Grace is not a potion to charm life to our liking; charms are magic. Grace does not cure all our cancers, transform all our kids into winners, or send us all soaring into the high skies of sex and success. Grace is rather an amazing power to look earthy reality full in the face, see its sad and tragic edges, feel its cruel cuts, join in the primeval chorus against its outrageous unfairness, and yet feel in your deepest being that it is good and right for you to be alive on God’s good earth. Grace is power, I say, to see life very clearly, admit it is sometimes all wrong, and still know that somehow, in the center of your life, “It’s all right.” This is one reason we call it amazing grace. . . . Grace is the one word for all that God is for us in the form of Jesus Christ.^a

Grace doesn’t take away our problem, but it allows us to experience God alongside us while we are in the midst of it. And he promises to “restore, support, and strengthen” us.

Father,

Sometimes it does feel like life is all wrong. Thank you that you understand every circumstance of each mom reading this, and that you will come to us and meet us with your grace in our moment of need, if we will just ask. Amen.