Wearing Grace

It’d been a bit of an everyday miracle — us leaving the farm and all those baby pigs out in the barn and traveling to Ecuador to meet children sponsored through the Christian humanitarian organization, Compassion International.

On our first day in Ecuador, on a steep mountainside under direct sun, we bent beside Rosa, a pig farmer herself, and planted potatoes into her loamy earth.

Rosa’s youngest, little Liliana, she scooped up a puppy right there next to the potato patch and she just hid behind its gaping mouth, her eyes all large and laughing.

Rosa told us what Liliana had done — that Liliana had found that puppy wandering abandoned, lost, outside her classroom. That Liliana had brought the puppy home to love. That Liliana loved. And when Liliana gaped all happy, just like the puppy, I laughed right out loud.

And there it was again, words from One Thousand Gifts—and I could feel it again, the joy of it welling: We receive grace.

And through us, grace could flow on. Like a cycle of water in continuous movement, grace is meant to fall, a rain … again, again, again. We could share the grace, multiply the joy, extend the table of the feast, enlarge the paradise of His presence.

We are blessed. We can bless. This is happiness.

We are blessed, and couldn’t we bless and couldn’t this fullness flow on and on and on and isn’t this the realest happiness?

Liliana, living in a single-parent home, living in abject poverty, looking for a sponsorship through Compassion, Liliana with less than little, she brings a puppy home just to love, and I’m the one scooping it up, what really is — that the giving away is the getting of joy.

After a week of beautiful children and praying with families up the Amazon and serving with pastors planting churches, we fly a continent home. And a week later, and a whole half a world north of Liliana and her puppy, I wake up strangely happy. Life change is as simple as changing our choices, and transformation is fully possible when we form our decisions differently — form them into the image of Christ.

A fashion catalog comes in the mail. Models standing beside llamas in the village of some cobbled South American street. I’ve just seen it, the dirt floors, the dark and no sinks, behind the doors on the street where the model sways thin in her $588 dress. I think of Rosa’s one bran-sack window and how she turned away when her heart rained grief. Poverty can’t be airbrushed and it hides its tears and you won’t see it modeled on the front covers of glossy magazines.

I like the model’s shoes.

How in the world can I like her shoes?

There is this, and it unknots everything in me, smoothes me out, and it’s the way the choices change: What if we wanted to be beautiful more than we wanted to buy beautiful?

The Enemy tempts that stuff is what makes us lovely — when the Truth is surrender makes us the loveliest and what is more lovely than love? Love, it knows no other way than to give away.

Liliana, she had mimicked puppy joy and I had laughed right out loud and so had she, and the moment, it had light all along the seams. What could be lovelier than this? Her loving a lost puppy and me loving her and Christ loving all the lost? Why not change all the choices for this? Model all that matters, the Beautiful, a life like Christ’s — and imitate Christ’s joy — the way He gives.

The way the happiness and healing is always in the opening of a hand, the opening a life to the largeness of God. It stays with me and I wear this, the joy of it — the way Liliana laughed in all her sheer loveliness.

Lord of my life, what if I wanted to be beautiful more than I wanted to buy beautiful? Though the Enemy tempts that stuff is what makes me lovely, remind me that surrender to You makes us the loveliest and what is more lovely than counting the ways You love? Change my life by changing my choices and transform me by forming my decisions into the image of the sheer loveliness of Christ.