Picture of Grace

These past few weeks I’ve felt like a toddler learning to walk yet again, excited by the rediscovery of stepping out and accepting God’s grace. It’s really all around me - even in the midst of hospital visits and sick children, broken relationships and deceit – I just wasn’t looking. Grace defined simply – an undeserved gift. Grace experienced though is something of an epiphany. As John Newton wrote in the famous hymn, “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost, but now am found, was blind but now I see.” His life was a bit of a tragic story, and one that I can identify with.

On Saturday I shared his story with the children of Amazing Grace Orphanage. Newton, like these children, was orphaned at a young age. For a while he lived with relatives who ridiculed his faith in God, and by age 11 he left both them and his God behind, in hopes of adventure and acceptance on the open sea. He worked many years on many different ships, fired from job after job for insubordination and his heavy drinking. On a journey from Africa to England by sea, John was wounded terribly from having fallen overboard and harpooned back to safety, and sent below deck to keep out of trouble. He had nothing but time on his hands to contemplate the mistakes and emptiness that now defined his life. A tremendous storm came, threatening the lives of everyone on board. Everyman, able bodied, freed man or slave, came to the deck to bail water and fight to keep the ship afloat. It was in this very moment as John faced the end of his life, that the powerful love of God flooded through him as a reassurance of His presence and love. That moment so impacted John that his life was forever changed, and he went on to become a loving husband and the minister of a church. In those years he wrote 280 hymns, the most well-known being the one that retold the story of God reaching out to him in his darkest hour.

It is true for each of us that God loves without ceasing, even when we have turned away and done things that we know are wrong. I watched the children’s faces remain attentive through the story, and even saw eyes of recognition. “I once was lost, but now am found.” Their understanding was translated onto paper as we drew pictures together of things we found amazing and things that showed us God’s grace. Taban Morris drew a fierce lion, awesome in its power. Lillian and Rose drew pictures of Jesus praying over someone kneeling before him, “forgiving and healing” they explained. This coming Saturday Rick’s going to share the story of the prodigal son found in Luke 15. It’s the story of a son who took his inheritance, squandered it away, and returned home to his father in shambles and disgrace. Expecting ridicule, scorn, rejection, anything but the sight of his father running toward him, arms open wide to receive the son that was lost and now found. My prayer is that the children of Amazing Grace will have that picture in their hearts - of God the Father running toward them, with arms open wide to receive them, always loving, always waiting for them to come home and be with Him.