Learning the hard way.

There are things that never get old. Like blossoming flowers, the first snow fall, the smell of fall, the way the people in your life love you.

Sometimes, regular life, dulls the brilliance of these thing. The day in and day out normalcy leaves us feeling complacent about the little miracles that meet us with each day.

The struggle though is to not let commonplace get the last word.

It's been a rough couple of days.  Days that have been a culmination of stuffing feelings and change that is inevitable, and the idea that my life might looks significantly different in the moments to come, the idea that everyone is horribly human and that sometimes our humanness gets the best of us. I wonder where jesus is, and whether or not the church can change the world when so many shitty people are doing things in the name of Jesus.

and it kind of caught up with me. When i don't feel affirmed, when i feel like my work doesn't have meaning, when i feel like my friendship isn't t enough. I cry. I throw softballs as hard as i can.

Sometimes, though, people show up, and even the smallest things remind us how profoundly we're loved. I often spend a lot of time, doubting how loved i am. How if my life fell apart (again) i'd be alone.

So i spend a lot of time, feeling alone in case lonely is actually in my future.

But then things happens to prove me wrong. People show up at work with drinks and scones and let me cry as i hug them. They let me word vomit over  group texts, or they do the very brave thing of loving me when it the most frustrating.

The funny thing about me, is that when i let humaness get the best of me in a big loud way, Jesus sneeks in, quiet, unassuming, showing me in an ordinary way, that love does win, and it doesn't have to be big and flashy, it's constant. it's people. it's how relieved you feel when someone who you truth shows you in their own way that they are for you.

In metaphorical way of grabbing your hand and holding it until the tide goes out and you can feel you can get back on the horse  again.

In small ordinary ways, they re-write the failures, they help you spin your unlucky, hard stuff in a way that helps see how  Jesus is doing the hard work to reclaim and redeem your story in a way that shows you and the world that God holds all of us, safely and securely.

Today, I'm thankful for the people in my life who don't have to love me, who know how to show me that the world doesn't get to win, that they're in the trenches with me, if i stop long enough to look.

We're not related. Nope, we come from different places and decades, but if family is measured in love....well, then i guess we are.

Sometimes when i think about how much i rely on people to exist daily for literally everything. I feel ashamed, and guilty and like i'm weak.

But i think that the type of community that Jesus talks about. The type of community that we long for in our hearts, looks very clearly like that. The type of thing where we are so connected that the love and relationship and together is so normal to us, but so strange from the outside.

It's the kind of thing where other people don't understand it, but kind of want the exact same thing,

Isn't that want we all want? To belong somewhere, to love people in a way that makes you go out of your way to make sure they know, even in the smallest way, that you are so loved and cared for. That someone sees you, and believes in you.

and will literally and figuratively grab your hand.

It's a funny thing to walk out a haze of doubt, and fear and hurt, and know quite how to recover or do it right. how to make it right.
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The truth is, though, we can't make it right. Grace and forgiveness? that's not us. It's Jesus working in us and nothing we can get to on our own.

I'm overwhelmed by  grace and forgiveness that is extended to me. Too often.  i feel undeserving and guilty instead of grateful and thankful that love looks like this.

love looks like so many things i take for granted on the regular. I'm thankful for the eyes that eventually  see the truth, but all too often i see after i feel like i've done irreversible damage.

I don't know how to better understand grace, i'm just glad that it is offered to me as freely as a hello from a friend.