Pure Grace

I love it when God meets me in unexpected places. It always reminds me how involved He is in the details of my life. Last week Neil and I packed our bags and headed to CA for one more family wedding fiesta. My cousin Blake married his Cal Poly sweetheart Stephanie at a beautiful wedding nestled in the Northern CA redwoods. Neil and I have visited Southern CA together three different times. I was born in Mission Viejo, CA so it's always fun to go back there and retrace memories from my childhood. This trip though, was our first trip to Northern CA and it included a visit to the city where I lived during my junior high and high school days.

As the trip approached I found myself twisting into knots. I hadn't been back to that city since October of my freshman year in college. My roommate and I traveled back to our high school for that post-graduation football game that everyone feels the urge to attend at some point. You know what I'm talking about. After leaving high school, I think we all return at least once to see if it still feels the same. It didn't feel the same and it only served to remind me how glad I was to be done with that season of my life.

We all have those moments in our past that make us cringe when we recall them. The content of the moment may vary from person to person, but we all get that deep-in-the-pit-of-our-stomach pang upon recollection of some of our more dingy moments. I had some, ok many, of my most dingy moments in high school. So I'm sure that you can predict my level of excitement at returning to that place... somewhere like -100 on a scale of 1-100!

I talked all of this over with my counselor right before I left on my trip. I didn't want to be bothered by returning to my home in N. CA. I wanted to be excited about taking my husband to see some of the landmarks of my teen years. Beyond that I had worked really hard to come clean before the Lord in my post-high school years. I knew and believed that I was a new creation in Christ "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone (glory!), the new has come!" 2 Corinthians 5:17. But I still couldn't shake the nagging fear that I would bump into some skeletons with my husband at my side during this trip.

I promise that this will all tie together with God showing up in small places...I had to give some background for it to be meaningful!

As usual, my counselor offered up some morsels of wisdom for me to chew on. She told me that when I looked back at those "dingy moments" (my term) I needed to give myself grace. She said that people often look back at mistakes made in their youth and they evaluate them from an adult perspective. When we make mistakes in our youth we are making them with the limited cognitive and emotional resources that youth have. She told me to go sit in a youth group meeting and observe the teens there to give me some perspective on how I was at that age! I can't keep beating myself up as an adult for choices I made as a teen, no matter how blatantly sinful they were. She ended with telling me to spend time dwelling on the good memories while I was there and to give myself a lot of grace when I was confronted with any not so good memories.

I felt better and I even became excited at showing Neil around. We arrived in San Ramon on Thursday. I planned to take Neil around on a tour the next day. Thursday night we met with our dear friends the Breaults. They are those friends that no matter how long it has been, when you gather together it's as if no time has passed. I didn't want the evening to end, but unfortunately my body was ready to leave before my heart was. It had been a long day of traveling and by 11pm Neil and I figured we should go. As we headed out the door Daney (Mrs. B), hugged me and presented me with a little gift bag. Inside the sweetly wrapped bag was a bottle of lotion and the name of the lotion was...PURE GRACE!

I got in the car and just sat there stunned. God had given me a big reminder in a small gift. when I got back to the hotel I opened the bag and took out the bottle. The description on the back said "Pure Grace is the clean smell of soap and water, the memory of fresh air woven into a set of crisp, white cotton sheets, a cold deep breath on a snowy winter night, the best summer morning you have ever known, the one white T-shirt that feels better than all the rest… " What a fabulous reminder of the grace lavishly bestowed on us from the Lord!

The next morning as we prepared to tour some of my old stomping grounds, I rubbed the lotion onto my arms and neck. As I inhaled the clean, fresh, smell of Pure Grace, I reminded myself to allow God's grace to wash over any dingy moments that I stumbled on throughout that day. Isn't that just like our God to put a small bottle of "grace" in my path when I most needed a reminder of the overflowing grace that He gives? Where has He showed up in your life lately? He's very creative, so keep your eyes open and remember to STOP (savor the observable presence) each day.