Becoming Grace

I walk in our back door to candlelight still flickering, hang the keys on the hook, and look around at the steep mountain of laundry there in the mudroom, the shoes scattered, a coat dropped. The mudroom sink is grime ringed. Fingerprints smear across the mirror.

I laugh the happiest wonder.

In the afternoon’s drizzle, I give happy thanks for the daily mess with a smile a mile wide because this is again my chance to wholeheartedly serve God, to do full-bodied eucharisteo with the hands and the heart and the lips. I can count each task a gift, pure eucharisteo.

Grace!

This work — the thousand endless jobs — they each give the opportunity for one to become the gift, a thousand times over! Because with every one of the thousand endless jobs, I become the gift to God and to others because this work is the public God serving, the daily liturgy of thanks, the completing of the Communion service with my service.

Eucharisteo wakens me wide-eyed and nodding to the truth that I—a mother of six—now own a truth bought with the practice of eucharisteo.

I reach out and touch the reflection in the splattered mirror over the sink and whisper into those eyes: Yes, today, again, yes, you can bless! Here you can enact eucharisteo; here you can become a current in a river of grace that redeems the world.

Even me. I think of my brother-in-law, John. John, who had buried his two sons, who let me into his healing through crazy grief when he said, “The way through the pain is to reach out to others in theirs.” I have known ache and becoming the blessing is what deeply blesses us and this is the way He binds up our wounds.

I think back to earlier, washing each other’s feet at the women’s small group. How we take Communion. Then, quietly, I fill the basins with water warm and circled together as a community we give communion. We bare our toes, soles, and I bend with sisters in Christ, dip my hands into water, and touch shy skin. We wash feet, all around, we wash feet. We lap water across skin and I hold a woman’s heel and I gently bathe and as group facilitator I ask each in the room to think about this washing of feet as symbolic of our lives on a grand scale, of how we are called to complete the Communion service in service. I tilt my head to look into her face and I ask it quiet in a quiet room: “Do you, in your day-to-day life, feel served? How might we as a community better serve you?”

And she, mother of eight, an elder’s wife, children’s ministry leader, one who pours her life out in unending ways, she whispers, haltingly through emotion. “But I’m the one who needs to ask if I’ve been a blessing.”

“But you — oh, how you have blessed.” With the tepid water, I wash her toes, these beads between fingers, and I recount the long string of ways she’s intimately blessed me: “The day you took me for a walk through the woods and listened to the faint heartbeat of my faith. The countless words you have sent me, a hand of friendship.” I take the cloth and wash her heel. “The way you have been real with me, transparent and authentic, and we have been mothers and we have been sisters and we have wept.” And I look up into her face, her wet feet in my hands, and again the chin wobbles all feeling. In this room of women, washing feet, it overflows. With memories of the ways each has become the blessing. Unmasked, we wash our faces in tears of joy. Hands cupping dripping soles, I see how it is our very presence in each other’s lives that makes us the gift. By the very function not of our doing but of our being, I see we are the beloved of God.

And so we become the love of God, blessing those He loves.

And even here, right where I am, I can become the blessing again, a little life that multiplies joy, making the larger world a better place.

God can enter into me, even me, and use these hands, these feet, to be His love, a love that goes on and on and on forever, endless cycle of grace.

I am nearing the wonder of Communion.

God, whenever the pain comes, let me know it gently: Joy and pain, they are but two arteries of the one heart that pumps through all those who don’t numb themselves to really living — and the way through the pain is to reach out to others in theirs. Use me today, and let me become the gift back to You through the work before me. In thanks for all Your gifts, make me a gift, because becoming the blessing is what deeply blesses. Enter into me, even me, and use my life to be Your love. This I pray.