GRACE
Why is it so Amazing?!
Have you ever thought what is so amazing about GRACE? I am a believer, and maybe for a non-believer it is something different. Maybe not.
Grace is the quiet force that meets you when you have nothing left to prove and nowhere left to hide. It does not ask whether you deserved the fall, only whether you are willing to rise. It carries no ledger, keeps no score. It simply holds you – through your worst nightmares and when you ride high in victory. What makes grace astonishing is that it arrives unearned, yet feels perfectly timed.
I have suffered severe turbulence in my life and this line from Amazing Grace resonates with me = “Grace has brought me safe this far”- through storms I thought would end me, through choices I wish I could undo, through inner peace lost and found again. Grace does not abandon one.
It stays.
For any one of us, believer and non-believer, grace is a universal human capacity. It is the ability to respond to imperfection – our own and others’ – with generosity rather than harshness. Grace is recognisable everywhere: in forgiveness that is not demanded, in patience that is not owed, in dignity offered when it could easily be withheld. It makes life possible when it seems to overwhelm us.
Grace is both for the vanquished and the winners. As we take a victory lap, grace lifts us to expand the view – to humble the victor, and to reveal the many more summits still waiting beyond our sight. When broken, grace lifts us – to witness the unstoppable rise of the morning light, and the slow return of an horizon beyond ourselves.
And if you have thought of grace as a gentle breeze, the polite servant, something that knows its place, I have news for you.
GRACE is counterintuitive, almost scandalous because it arrives where it has no business being – slipping into grief, failure, and pride alike, and refusing to be contained. It asks nothing of us, yet gives everything: light in shadow, space in suffocation, dignity in despair. In triumph it pulls as down a notch or two – “feet on the ground,” as my mother used to say. It does not judge our missteps, nor does it erase them; it simply arrives, quietly overturning our assumptions about what we deserve, what we can hold, and how life should touch us. Astonishing and undefinable, grace reminds us that even in the depths of pain or the heights of triumph, we are never beyond the reach of something larger, freer, and generous beyond our comprehension.
Norman, my friend from university gave me a book ‘What is so amazing about Grace?’ many years ago when he thought I needed to understand GRACE better. Somewhere inside that book is this sentence:
“People who have been broken, humbled, or forgiven tend to carry grace more naturally, because they understand the cost of being without it.”
So true.
Perhaps most amazing of all: once you have truly received grace, you begin – almost without thinking – to offer it. My wish is that You & Me & All of Us will start handing out grace like free flyers, going forward.
I imagine Oscal Wilde would have said something like this = “One must never trust a virtue that behaves itself; grace, fortunately, is far too delightfully improper to follow the rules.”
Q : “What is so amazing about grace?
A : That it comes unearned, stays unforced, and lifts us – whether broken or triumphant – healing us, grounding us. Oxygen for the soul.
This weekend there is a pause in the hectic pace of life – globally. It is for a belief already more than 2 000 years old, but even if that falls outside your belief system, it is an opportune time to make sure your shutters are open to let grace works its magic in your own life.