Different Kinds of Grace

I am working in Texas.  My husband is still, for now, working in Minnesota.  But he got to visit for over two weeks at Christmastime, which was a wonderful gift.  We got to take some time off together, and he got to play at Christmas Eve and Sunday after Christmas services.  In fact, on Christmas eve, when we were without organ music for our largest service at 7:00 p.m, we received the gift of piano, guitar, euphonium and flute accompaniment instead.

And it was good.  Gifts were multiplied, more than we knew we had.  Perhaps there are even more, so many that we cannot even imagine.  On Christmas Eve, I glimpsed another kind of grace.

Friday morning my husband was scheduled to return to Minnesota.  But before he left, he made breakfast, while I took the dog out for a walk.  It was a cloudy, gloomy morning, and half-way around our walk, I tripped over a curb or a tree root or something and fell.  It hurt, and I felt stupid and awkward besides.  I limped home, feeling sort of defeated.

After breakfast, and after taking my husband to the airport, and after stopping in to the church to take care of a few things for Sunday, I took myself to urgent care to check on my ankle, which ached.  It was just a precaution, I told myself.  I was pretty sure it was just a sprain, but I wanted to make sure that I made the right treatments.  They insisted on taking X-rays, though, and told me that I did, indeed, have the tiniest little fracture:  a bone chip, they said.  I have a CD of the X-rays, if I want to see for myself.

When I explained to the doctor what happened, I again felt that sense of being stupid and awkward.  I tripped over a curb.  Or maybe it was a tree root.  It wasn't like I was doing extreme sports or anything very interesting.  I couldn't blame it on ice, or my dog.  I just tripped.  How could that happen?  I sighed.

The doctor smiled.  "Happens all the time," he said.

And I felt another kind of grace, the grace of being allowed to be human.  It is not the same as the grace  of discovering unknown gifts, and it is not the same as the grace of being forgiven (the one I know the most about).  

Sometimes I am guilty of making grace too narrow.  I think of the amazing grace that saved a wretch like me.  But grace is not just the word of forgiveness in my wretchedness.  Grace is in the myriad of gifts that surprise me when I think I do not have enough.  Grace is in beauty that surprises, stars more numerous that I can count, many voices coming together.  Grace is being surprised by abundance.  

And Grace is this as well:  being allowed to be human, make mistakes, fall down, limp along.  

It happens all the time. 

A Small, Wonderful Mistake

On Sunday at worship, a very small, wonderful thing happened.

During the closing hymn (a rousing rendition of "How Firm a Foundation", by the way), we carried the cross and processed to the entry of the church, as always.  The people turned to face the cross, as always (or at least as they have begun to do during this past year).  We stood there, continuing to sing, as always.

And then, three little girls, about three or four years old, began to dance.

They boldly entered the aisle and moved to their own graceful rhythms.  A fourth little girl, who had turned around to follow the cross, looked at them with wide and wondering eyes -- and then ran out to join them.  Soon there were four little girls, dancing in the aisle.

I wished I had my camera, because I was perfectly situated to take a video of the scene.

I also secretly wished I could join them.  I was a little afraid, I suppose, of what people would think.  I was a little afraid that if I started dancing, they might stop.

And I didn't want them to stop.

During the past year, we have messed with our worship services some.  We are a congregation in redevelopment, which means we are re-learning what it means to be the body of Christ in this place and in this time and for these people, some of whom we are convinced we have not met yet.  So we are talking to each other and asking questions and trying some different things, with various degrees of success.

For this year, we have (for example) gone from two services to one.  People are worshipping together who never worshipped together before.  We are trying to get beyond the catch phrases "contemporary" and "traditional" as well.  For some, the experiment has been a resounding success.  For others, well, the jury is still out.

Our Sunday School schedule has changed as well, at least for this year.  We are trying some intergenerational projects, and a short children's church.  In the past, the children always started church with the whole congregation, and then moved to their classrooms.  This year the children are in Sunday School at the beginning of worship (hence no Children's Message this year), and they come to join us after the sermon, either at the prayers or the peace.

I have to admit, that I do miss seeing the children with their families at the beginning of worship.  Though I have mixed feelings about the "children's message" sometimes, I do miss those opportunities as well.  We probably won't keep the same schedule next year.  It was an experiment.  Some people might think it was a mistake.  We shouldn't have done it.  We should have left well enough alone.

Perhaps.

Two things struck me, though:

1.  If we were worshipping the same way as we did last year, we would have never had this small, wonderful moment.  The children would be safe in their Sunday School classes, with parents hurrying to retrieve them.  This moment was made possible by our 'mistake.'

2.  No one who saw the tiny dancers tried to stop them.  No one told me, "They shouldn't have been doing that in church."  One person even said, "That was an Alleluia moment."

I am not sure which of these two things gives me the most hope.  Perhaps it is the first one, to think that out of our missteps and miscalculations can come such grace.

But the more I think about it, it is the second thing that strikes me as most hopeful for our redevelopment.

One of the things a redevelopment church must learn is to create a space, to embrace a wider welcome for people who do not worship in exactly the same tones that we do.  We don't need to give up liturgy, but we do need to recognize that it's a skeleton that can be fleshed out in many ways, some of them even unscripted.

One of the tasks of a redevelopment church is learning to welcome the stranger.

We might as well start with our children.