I stepped into my blog thinking grace is supposed to look “pretty”. Grace…calm, soft and soothing.
But Grace too, is flipping surgical. It cuts into the flesh, replaces the heart, sews up the wound and leaves scars to remind us what took place in our lives. Ezekiel 36.26 says, “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.”
Grace doesn’t arrive as a trickle, it swells through floodgates. I am the dam that holds grace back if I dare place boundaries around it and call it charming. I fool myself if I think I can contain it in the pastels of a blog.
Grace is bold. Grace is honest and raw, meeting us right in our unloveliness.
Ironically then, I’ll share that neither am I, the soft, muted colors used to launch the design of this blog. I laugh at myself every time I log on and see “dainty”. But I designed it that way because it’s a visual from a point in my life when the Jesus community conveyed to me grace is soft, pretty and comes in a pastel-personality…that grace earns joy-awards, is fortified with courtesy and looks quite lovely tied in a bow of encouragement.
Hear me on this: the community wasn’t wrong, grace is all that.
But my bold confidence is also grace prodding others to be their best, pushing them towards a glimpse of what God sees in them…even though I never won joy awards and my candor may have stung more than it inspired.
Grace poured from heaven the day I discovered very simply…neither side, me, nor this Jesus community was ready for each other. We still all serve Jesus as He equips, directs and guides us, and we each receive grace from Him. That was bold, vibrant grace for me.
Just as Solomon was not quite prepared to adequately steward over all he was given, we, as leaders in this Jesus community were not prepared to redeem the blessings of each other. At least, not before we understood how to interpret the colors of each other’s human-grace needs.
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I came from a community of people radically sold out to Jesus, moved 725 miles away, and found a new community of people who love Jesus. But all those miles and a generational divide from one community to the next can feel like planets away, even when communities share common goals. When expectations and people are very different, the lenses of grace can get cloudy.
In the new community we “got” the cultural nuances between New Yorkers and the Midwest…the need for speed vs. an abated pace, the assertive vs. passive. It was challenge enough in itself, yet, we all recognized the distinctions. What we probably missed a little too late was the interpretation of inter-generational grace: how each generation extends and receives personalized grace.
Landing on the cusp of turning 50 and suddently inside a leadership team primarily consisting of differing generations created unexpected ministry tension. Unexpected, because the same generational tension did not exist in my workplace. Why?
Because of grace.
Immersed in marketing and design, it is my job to stay current, identify trends, work with emerging generations and embrace change. I do. But in the secular workplace where grace should exist, it’s not what is measured.
In the Jesus community, it is. Freely we receive and freely we should give. But what is human-learned grace to Generation Y, the “trophy kids” who learned love from helicopter parents that reassuringly protected with care, kind words and abounding encouragement? How is grace received from a boomer whose grace and grit is discipline, focus, self-assurance and hard work ethic? How is grace delivered to Gen Jones who learned human-grace through rewards purchased with loyalty, hard work and commitment? Generations divided with enough of a gap to be parent/child, but now face-to-face peers with unspoken expectations.
We didn’t understand the grace each other needed.
As each one has received a gift, minister it to one another, as good stewards of the manifold grace of God. 1 Peter 4.10
The unmerited favor I could have, should have extended to my Gen Y friends was praise for the attempt and encouragement in effort. I missed it. The unmerited favor my Gen Y friends could have extended to me was follow-through, communication and accountability. They missed it. We moved forward standing on our generational platforms with clueless assumptions and grace flowing into places neither side needed. We extended grace, it just wasn’t received because it wasn’t the grace the other side needed.
But there’s a greater side of Grace.
There is no right, there is no wrong. Sometimes we just have to look for the places we need to extend, not human-interpretation of grace, but true, unmerited grace.
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Pray daily for the grace needed in the moment.