Every now and then…like now, about 4 hours into a six hour flight to San Diego for my part time university research gig, I whip out my kindle, and instead of continuing the latest book I downloaded, I play some good ol solitaire. I played a round and won with ease. I decided to play another and an old familiar habit snuck in- a quick glance of the hand dealt to assess the likelihood I’d win. I could guarantee a wining hand by simply selecting “winning deal,” but that feels too easy. Where’s the fun in that? So, I select “random deal.” It’s just that I like a random deal that I can win.
I decided to play the latest random hand dealt and a few times, especially when it seemed like I was taking longer than I preferred to play, or I had circulate through the computerized deck more times than I wanted which results on losing points, I was tempted to end mid game and try a new, more winnable, random deal. I resisted the temptation. I played the hand out…and…I won.
Now, had recent life circumstances not nudged me to start a book on grief and loss to unpack my own loss, I’d say “And just like I stuck out the unknown of the game and won, Grace too sticks it out with us so we win.” It sounds good. But it’s hard to navigate your own loss and read about loss and then just smile and stick a bow on it, a smile on you, and a win on the scoreboard of life. It’s hard to resist prettying up the unpretty. And trust me loss is not pretty. grieving loss is not pretty. Yet and still it’s a part of our lives, inescapable and non discriminatory. I took the win and thought “Well, I made it through that one.” At best, whether I won or conceded to a loss, I would have made it through. No qualifiers to that. No at least, no at best, no with a smile, no with minimal angst. Just made it through. Period. Kind of like grieving a loss, you learn to let go of the qualifiers and the packaging of the unpretty and to recognize it and the moment and making it through.
It’s tempting to assert that we only get to the good in life by grace. That we don’t arrive at ungood in life by grace. That grace takes a bathroom break or goes out to lunch and leaves us with a random deal. Grace doesn’t work like that. Grace gets us through, moment, by moment.
Thank goodness when the moment yields a win. When it yields the promotion, the chemo has worked, the healthy baby delivered, the accepted offer on the house, the perfect shoes on a sale your budget needed, the date gone really well, the small business loan approved, the loved one who can make it home for the holidays.
Yet, Grace is no less absent or more present when the moment we go through yields a layoff, a foreclosure, a stage 4 diagnosis and list of local hospice options, a third miscarriage, a confirmed affair, a shut off notice for your gas, a failed college course that means graduation will be yet another semester away, a rejected business loan, so little money in the bank you are navigating if it’s better to skip lunch and buy a bus pass or walk the 23 blocks to work and eat peanut butter and jelly at your desk. Grace is there too.
Grace is not the means to an end. It is the means and the end. It is ever present in the ways we navigate the life carefully curated and planned for us. It is ever present as we reach whatever it is we deem an end, what we deem a win or a loss.
The more I learn to be gracious towards grace, to acknowledge its presence, what it is offering, accepting its acceptance of me, the more I find myself comforted, present, and able to trust that I am not wholly undone, hopeless, or lost. The more I waken from my daze of denial and see clearly the way that grace does- the way grace sees me, sees moments, and sees eternity, the more I can ease into me and what life offers at any given moment.
My hope for you this week is come what may, when each moment has come to a close you can ground yourself in knowing you made it through. No qualifiers. That you are enough and grace too is enough. That in a western culture and a time of year where we are tempted to polarize moments as wins and losses, of priding ourselves on buying the biggest and most expensive, that we instead see moments as grace leading, accompanying, and seeing us through. And may that be enough.