Fearless Faith

We are awash in grace and don’t know it. How can that be? For all our declared best intentions, the world is still a challenging place. It shouldn’t be so hard given the resources and advantages at hand. Unfortunately, we need only look a short distance away to confirm our blindness in that regard. Natural and unnatural disasters have ravaged places that look eerily like the communities we live and work and play in. Is it fate or simply our turn to bear the griefs borne by so many others? Never an advocate of required suffering at the hands of a deity, I posit that grace finds us when we least suppose, encounters that are profound and deeply personal.

We imagine that self-sufficiency is enough to thwart the afflictions that trouble others until they appear at our door demanding to be let in. Those are moments of truth for all of us, a reckoning of who and whose we are. If there is grace in suffering, it certainly is not cheap grace by any means as Bonhoeffer would caution. In giving we receive. In receiving we give. A blessing for others is often a simple “you’re welcome” in response to their “thank you.” No complicated theology or obligatory IOUs required.

It is easy to speak of the needs of others when most of those same needs are met for us. That is the grace we are awash in, all-encompassing care begging to be extended to those within our reach … cool water from a deep well of faith. Once one experiences such eloquent grace, it is never forgotten.

I encountered such unfettered grace as part of the Big Thompson flood cleanup in the mid-70s. Welcomed onto crews sponsored by the then Mennonite Central Committee disaster response program, teams of several workers each were assigned the task of deconstruction of damaged homes so that larger equipment could be brought in to cart off the debris. My team dismantled the home of a volunteer firefighter who lost his wife and children to the flood. In an especially poignant moment, we noted that a fresh crop of peaches had recently been canned by the family, glass jars and lids marked with a date two days before the flood.

I was thankful for the disaster crew and their experience, for the grace extended to me by those more practiced and to work shoulder-to-shoulder with persons from across the country. The volunteers came without expectations of praise for a job well done. And each evening, once again awash in grace, they lifted up community and caring with nightly devotionals and an intentional inventory of the volunteers’ emotional gas tanks. Was everyone in accord with their assignments? How were they feeling? Were there any concerns that needed to be raised (including the rattlesnakes that seemed to be in every pile of debris)?

There was no hierarchy nor class involved, no jostling for authority, no participation medals to be worn for simply being present. What was most consistently present were threads of grace woven in and among the cleanup crews, support staff and local residents, threads of grace that persist to this day. And while the location might be different in addressing current disasters, the elements of grace remain.

Be in thought and prayer for volunteers doing amazing work.