Perceiving Grace

How do we converse with a God who may not seem to honor our honor?

In the quiet, I wonder, cue card with a memory verse in hand — if I had the perspective of the whole, perhaps I’d see it? That which seems evil, is it a cloud to bring rain, to bring a greater good to the whole of the world? Who would ever know the greater graces of comfort and perseverance, mercy and forgiveness, patience and courage, if no shadows fell over a life? I dare flip the cue card over and I make out words on the back side, “See now that I, I am He, and there is no god besides Me; It is I who put to death and give life. I have wounded and it is I who heal” (Deuteronomy 32:39 NASB). I nod. I know. I know. And these truth words reconfigure the battlefield under my feet.

I grip the card and I know all our days are struggle and warfare (Job 14:14) and the spirit-to-spirit combat I endlessly wage with Satan is this ferocious thrash for joy. He sneers at all the things that seem to have gone hideously mad in this sin-drunk world, and I gasp to say God is good.

The liar defiantly scrawls his graffiti across God’s glory, and I heave to enjoy God … and Satan strangles and I whiten knuckles to grasp real Truth and fix that beast to the floor.

It’s just that the eyes are bad — my perspective. “Your eye is a lamp that provides light for your body,” Jesus said. “When your eye is good, your whole body is filled with light. But when your eye is bad, your whole body is filled with darkness. And if the light you think you have is actually darkness, how deep that darkness is!” (Matthew 6:22 – 23 NLT). If Satan can keep my eyes from the Word, my eyesight is too poor to read light — to fill with light. Bad eyes fill with darkness so heavy the soul aches because empty is never truly empty; empty is only a full, deepening darkness. So this is what it is to be. Eve in the Garden, Satan’s hiss tickling the ear. “Did God actually say …?” (Genesis 3:1 ESV).

No Scripture glasses to read what God is trying to write through a prodigal child? Scrawl my own quick editing on the half-finished story: failure. Satan’s tongue darts.

Not wearing a biblical lens to decipher the meaning of a doctor’s ominous diagnosis? Just read Satan’s slippery interpretation: cheated.

Not using anything to bend the light of this world so I can read my own messy days? Spray on another layer of graffiti: worthless.

So I have been ambushed.

Without God’s Word as a lens, the world warps.

Who deserves any grace?

When I realize that it is not God who is in my debt but I who am in His great debt, then doesn’t all become gift?

Lord, You are the only lens that can correct the vision of a life. And if I don’t hunger daily for the bread of Your Word, I’ll develop sight deficiency. Make me Word reflective — that I may have the right perspective.