I am amazed at the grace of God.  In the random moments when I can shake myself loose from my preoccupations, preconceptions, and prejudices, and my self falls by the side, He is there.    I know this because I can look around in this world, and while planes crash and people contract cancer and children are abducted, there are moments when it is clear that love holds everything together.  When a man and his wife hold hands crossing the street.  When a little boy tries to comfort his little sister by jiggling his toy to distract her from her cares.  When a friend in the quiet of twilight delivers a meal to a family in grief.  When the sun rises and the world is asleep, but the sky is dotted with clouds in the east, and they burn in reds and golds as the sun morning fills the heavens.  Behind all of the catastrophes and cacophony is a the quiet, overwhelming voice of the One who holds it all together, and who, from his will, loves.  Because love is there, He is there.

What I am slowly realizing at this point in my life is that I was made to live in His grace.  We were all made to live in His grace.  But finding grace in this world is sometimes a challenge.  Love gets hidden in squabbles and squalor; love is obscured by greed and grief.  But still He asks us, you and I, if we want to know Him, to live by His grace.

What does this mean, to “live by grace”?  Brennan Manning puts it nicely:

To live by grace means to acknowledge my whole life story, the light side and the dark. In admitting my shadow side, I learn who I am and what God’s grace means.  As Thomas Merton put it, “A saint is not someone who is good but who experiences the goodness of God.” (The Ragamuffin Gospel, p. 25)

What is clear, from Manning’s reflection, is that living by grace has a lot to do with living in and from the goodness of God.