Get Out Your Yellow Highlighter

If your blog is titled wynnegraceappears- viewing life through a lense of grace, then that is what you do.

And if the biggest word in your seek cloud is GRACE then you have focused on grace.

And you highlight GRACE.

Everywhere is Grace, to be found, and named and marked and highlighted with the lemon colored highlighter.

And like the full moon which washes white on world and blinds by night, you witness to the good of God.

And all the while praying that what wages against good, and God’s good, and beauty and joy is held back and away and does not get a toe hold.

But you grieve at the pain.

And you grieve at the sin.

You grieve as God grieves at a disgruntled person killing a headmaster at a private school, knowing your children are safe but vulnerable. In a similar environment.

And you grieve at schism and brokenness in your world, your family or your church.

You highlight the beauty and what has already won and that is Jesus.

And Grace pours out on the wounds.  Like a big tube of salve you pray for all of it to squeeze out on the world where the wounds are raw and real.

You witness brokeness and unforgiveness and not what you expected to be walked out. By people you know. You love.

Your child says she feels sorry for…. and that is  for a man caught in the middle of schism. You know her understanding and her processing of schism is colored with pain and hurt.  She is her mothers’s child and the child of God. And she is a child.

So you gather up all collective hurt and pain and sin and  brokeness — offer it back to the Creator and pray for healing and forgiveness.

And a pouring out afresh and anew of His compassion. And in the spirtit of Lent you pray for restoration of the brokenness in your home and in your church and in your world.

And you highlight His Grace.

You reach for the big fat highlight marker and you color away.

Bold, crazy Grace.

And you know that He heals and that He welcomes a contrite spirit. Thanks be to God.  And when His grace appears as it has, and it does, and it will you say humbly  – God is Good, God is Great, Thanks be to God. We say to Him be all praise and Glory.

And she is making notes in the margin on how reconciliation and restoration are worked out and walked out.  She watches like the child that she is. What is extended.  What is received.  How Mercy is poured out.

She will look for forgiveness and compassion and the dying to self.

Things which are difficult in situations of conflict.

Oswald Chambers says:  “We are supervictors with a joy that comes from experiencing the very  things which look as if they are going to overwhelm us.”

No, in all these things  we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. – Romans 8:37

In this Lenten Season where do I need to extend forgiveness and where do I go to restore brokeness.  The heart wants to know.  The struggle to seek it out and reconcile are
undergirded by the Love of God.  Nothing can change His love.  Nothing can separate us from it.

Where we are weak without words to speak, He is strong.

Where we are frozen in stubborness or self-righteousness, He is mighty.

“..neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Yesterday i bought an Easter tree.  And beautiful wooden pastel eggs, pale and dull in their gentle beauty. I want to hang each egg on the limb of my Easter egg as a symbol to the new. But I wait.  Not yet.  Not quite yet.

But what of the unresolved and unreconciled. When Easter morning comes I want to sing like feathered trumpeter outside my window, that Grace and Mercy prevailed.

Today I want to color bold with the hot pink and blaze orange highlighter on the areas in my life where Grace was given Grace received.  His Love prevailed. I want to testify to His Love which washes fresh every morning.  No trial, no tribulation, no pain, no struggle, no schism, nothing is beyond the Love and restorative power of His Grace.

Those yellow markers mark the light and make them brighter and they dull the shadows of fear and death and sting of hurt.

Get out the highlighter and proclaim His Love.

Not in my own strength.  Not because of anything I can do alone.

But in the strength of the One who made me. He is the Overcoming One. The victory is won.