Kindling Grace

Mama has the tea ready when I get there for prayer group and Bible study first thing in the morning.

I have on the socks that the woman with the five kids and the stage-four cancer knit for me.

This is always the first thing — to go right into the throne room of God wearing nothing less than your aching prayers.

Anne’s on time for our early Saturday morning study at Mama’s, sitting at the end of the living room, there in the wingback, there with her Bible long open, like a woman waiting for the Coming.

I, of course, come late. Like a foolish woman straight out of a 6:00 a.m. parable, still trying to trim her lamp, trying to remember her oil, trying to stay awake. Anne, she smiles grace, as the rain pounds steady on the windows, all the leaves coming down wet and clinging, yellow and red and sad in first gray light.

I take the seat at the end of Mama’s couch. Curl my red knit socks up under me. Mama, she hands me a mug of steaming tea, apple cinnamon, and tells me it’s Psalm 107 this morning and could I just read the chapter right out loud?

Read it because it’s manna and you’ve got nothing to give if you haven’t gathered and you have to gather Word-manna at daybreak if you’re going to gain from it the daylong.

Read it because it’s your very life and why live emaciated and I open it like a woman who needs to be cured of one wild and lifelong eating disorder. I read Psalm 107: “Let them give thanks to the Lord for his unfailing love and his wonderful deeds for mankind …” And Anne looks over and Mama looks up and Mama asks it aloud. “Well?”

I pull at my socks and there is a lone beautiful woman battling cancer with her knitting needles and chemo and mothers grieving over children gone and men broken over everything shattered and hadn’t Spurgeon said it?

Know how to get grace enough to bear it.

It is a better thing to have a trouble, and know how to get grace enough to bear it. And we get grace enough to bear it — when we run into the arms of Grace who bore it all, into Him who is more than enough.

I run my hand across the Scripture page. Gather the manna up into hands, what really is, and all that feeds. Our cries to the Lord are what give us communion with the Lord. It’s the dire distress that drives us into the deep devotion. It’s when all fails, His love never fails — and this is why we are a people who can always give thanks.

The lights in the early morning, lights reflecting in the window, in the dark and in the rain — those lights look like tongues of fire.

Mama murmurs the words again. “Then they cried out to the Lord in their trouble … Let them give thanks to the Lord.” The Word open before a trio of women, it burns.

What if I gave thanks in the trouble, for the trouble, because the trouble is a gift that causes me to turn? What if I loved God not for His goods but for His love itself that is goodness enough? The theologian J. R. Miller wrote:

Mama fills our cups again with tea and the steam, it rises straight up, and I can see it in the window, the rising in burning lights. The reflection of those socks tucked up under me, the grief underlying. I drink down all this heat.

It’s only when grief and grace kindle us to the very same flame of gratitude to God — it’s only then that our love for God ignites in a pure blaze of glory.

It’s raining so hard.

We read and pray and offer up our tenacious thanks. Close our Bibles. Carry out our manna. I pull boots on, up over those socks, and cry out and into the communion. Step out into the morning storming.

Into the leaves falling in wind, the clinging in everything streaming straight down.

All these leaves, all this amber and scarlet — all this in pure flame.

God of fire, of light, of purity and holy glory, burn me with your Word. Take my distress and make it beautiful, this opportunity for deeper communion with You. May it light a purer devotion to You in all things that come today, I pray …