Five Minute Friday: Grace

Joining with Five Minute Friday sponsored by Lisa-Jo Baker. On Friday, Lisa-Jo posts a one word prompt and for five minutes even we write what the prompt brings to mind. No rewrite, nor editing just letting the words flow. 

 Today's Prompt: Grace

Five Minute Friday

Grace.

Unmerited favor.

You can’t win it.

You can’t buy it.

You can’t acquire it in any way except to ask for it knowing you don’t deserve it.

To ask for grace means you have to acknowledge that you need it. That you need someone to look beyond who you aren't, and what you don't have and just grant it.

Because.

The thought of grace breaks me in ways I can’t begin to describe. Asking for grace brings me face to face with all the things in me I really don’t want to see. All of the things I hide from myself as well as others. Knowing that I desperately need grace but have no right to ask for it is humbling in the extreme. Requesting grace helps me to understand the posture of kneeling in supplication, the folding over, the bending down, taking my body to the low depths* of where the state of my soul is. And in receiving grace, I begin (only begin) to understand the depth of the love it has taken to grant it unreservedly and without measure. 

~*~

 
Psalm 130: (KJV)

Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord.

² Lord, hear my voice: let thine ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications.
³ If thou, Lord, shouldest mark iniquities, O Lord, who shall stand?
⁴ But there is forgiveness with thee, that thou mayest be feared.
⁵ I wait for the Lord, my soul doth wait, and in his word do I hope.
⁶ My soul waiteth for the Lord more than they that watch for the morning: I say, more than they that watch for the morning.
⁷ Let Israel hope in the Lord: for with the Lord there is mercy, and with him is plenteous redemption.
⁸ And he shall redeem Israel from all his iniquities.