A Place for Grace

{This is a re-post from earlier this year...}

Sometimes you get more than you bargained for...

Like choosing {Grace} as your Word of the Year and being given way too many opportunities to extend it.

Giving grace can be painful...excruciating. But maybe that is where grace always is....in the place of pain...

He didn't want to follow through. He would have begged to be able to walk away from it all. He did beg. Yet, He knew what He had to do...take the insults, the false accusations, the lies, the disrespect, the injustices and absorb them all. That wasn't all...there was physical agony, too. Why? Because He deserved it? Hardly.

How did He respond? GRACE. {Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.} He would forgive them...He would beg His Father to forgive them all on the basis that they didn't have a clue. But maybe that was the point. They would never know the depths of the pain their own sin had caused...He would shield them from it. He would pay the price. They would never truly know.

I will follow His example. Does my enemy understand the depth of pain she has caused? No. Will she ever get it? Probably not. Is it important that she does? No. The only thing that matters that there is Grace in the Place of pain.

{Father, forgive her, for she doesn't know what she is doing.}