grace

I didn’t realize it, but today was the grand re-opening of a newly remodeled supermarket near my home. So when I stopped in to pick up some things the place was more full than I’ve ever seen it and all the checkers were newly-hired. The floor plan was as new to them as it was to me, plus they were obviously learning all the codes for the grocery items. In other words, lines were long and moved sloooowly.

There was a mom and her two kids in front of me. The checker was having to look up a lot of the codes for stuff that doesn’t grow with bar codes on them, like bananas. She knew she was taking a long time and apologized to me when she finally started ringing up my items. She’d done several items when the mom apologized to the checker because her 3 year old hadn’t yet caught on to the notion of paying for stuff in a store and had helped himself to a box of candy and eaten half of it, unbeknownst to her. Now she needed to pay for it.

The checker told her to wait until after she’d finished ringing up my items. I put myself in that young mom’s place: waiting around for the checker to finish while trying to keep 2 kids from being run over by grocery carts AND dealing with the embarrassment of everyone knowing her 3 year old was becoming a kleptomaniac. So I told the checker, “Just ring up the candy with my groceries.”

It felt good to see the look of relief of on the mom’s face. I told her, “Merry Christmas” and off they went. It felt even better to hear the woman in line after me remark to someone next to her, “That just made my day.”

As I took my groceries to my car, I thought about God’s grace. Isaiah tells us, “We all, like sheep, have gone astray… and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” (Isaiah 53:6) Jesus came from the Father expressly to take on himself the payment for our sin. That was the message that the early Church received with gratitude.

The church is here to continue Jesus’ work of offering grace to the world. The early church knew that, too, and it’s one of the reasons the church grew from an obscure Jewish sect of with 3,120 members after Peter’s sermon in Acts 2 to taking over the Roman Empire under Constantinople less than 300 years later (Rodney Stark estimates that in order to be a majority in the early 4th century there must have been at least 6 million Christians in the empire). When plagues threatened whole cities, early Christians cared for the sick while people of means fled to their country villas. Early Christians cared about the poor and those without status(like slaves and women). Outsiders looked on with admiration and appreciation. Some even decided to follow Christ, as did many of those that received God’s care through the Church.

So God used an everyday situation to remind me of why and how I’m to be a part of God’s purposes in the world. It was certainly worth the 89 cents the lesson cost me. I didn’t look to see whether the mom let the 3 year old finish the candy.

exhaling

I met today with my prayer partner. I meet with him once a week. What do I get out of it? A weekly opportunity to pause and take stock, to confess and bare my soul, letting someone else know what’s troubling me. Why is all this important? A lot of us seem to get along just fine without doing any of these things. But I find that having this weekly rhythm is like breathing. In a sense it’s an opportunity to exhale, to let go of things that have been accumulating in my spirit. The word for spirit in Hebrew is “ruach” which is the same as the word for “breath”. So taking a pause for reflection and confession really is exhaling.

If I don’t take the time to exhale, stuff builds up inside. We exhale to get rid of carbon dioxide and other things our bodies don't need. If we don’t exhale, we’ll lose consciousness (try it some time). I suppose if I didn’t have a time for regular spiritual exhaling, I’d be physically OK. But spiritually, I’d be unconscious, unaware of the movement of God’s Spirit around me because I’d be stifling the flow of God’s Spirit within me.

quality time

I heard a writer for a soap opera recently comment that he would get letters from viewers addressed to specific soap opera characters. The viewers would express some pretty deeply-felt emotion about the character, and they would do it by writing to the characters as if they were real people. The writer said something to the effect, “And why not? These viewers probably spend more quality time on a daily basis with the soap opera characters than with their own families.”

It made me wonder: what’s quality time? Maybe what the writer said is true. When we watch TV we pay attention carefully to everything that’s going on. We don’t want to miss any details or we might lose track of the story line. But when I’m interacting with my own family members I tend to be more concerned about what I need to tell them then in what they want to tell me. How often do I pay as much attention to what’s going on in their lives as I do to the details of what’s happening with a TV or movie character? Who’s really getting my quality time?