Our stories are distressingly familiar.
We start each week, or each new day, with adamant intention: I will lose weight; I won’t lose patience with the kids; I’ll treat my colleagues kindly; I won’t waste hours surfing on the Web.
And only hours or days later, we note the uptick on the scale; the strangely quiet children who endured our angry words; the whispering around the water cooler; the useless rantings of a hundred posts that only fenced us off from love.
Our best intentions are like “ropes of sand.” Convinced by all those self-improvement books that mastery is within our grasp, we measure all the transient things that never plumb the depths of our true brokenness.
There’s only one good work worth mentioning, according to the God who made us and redeemed us: “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent,” Jesus said, referring to Himself. When we admit our inability to makes ourselves leaner, kinder, wiser and more patient, we open up our lives to Him who says, “I am making all things new” (Rev 21:5). Our wholeness is the gift of grace: we cannot reach it by ourselves.
If virtues ever grace our lives, it will be grace at work in us.
Invite grace in, and give it room. And it will stay with you.
–Bill Knott