Grace Upon Grace

I am bewildered. God has been speaking to me about forgiveness for quite some time. I've only just been wading through those waters. Forgiveness is a journey. A few weeks ago, I experienced a breakthrough in my spiritual walk - to forgive the perpetrators of injustice, to forgive myself for the perpetual guilt and shame I have carried for years. Much had happened to bring me to that point of just being done with lugging around that weight. I was fed up with dragging the baggage around everywhere I went, a badge of pain and dishonor. I was done with it. So I put it down with no intentions of picking it back up. And then I tried to pick it back up. I wanted to use it as an excuse for my indignation, to weaponize it in order to punish the criminal for dragging me through utter pain and desolation of faith...or what I thought was faith. I so wanted to drag their names through the mud. I wanted them to pay the consequences of what they forced me to experience...the broken trust......

I Thank God Every Time I Remember You… This past week I experienced a whirlwind of emotions. On Monday, I found out that my paternal grandmother passed away after a long struggle with dementia. The woman I knew and loved had been gone for a long time, although slight glimpses of her personality seemed to trickle through. In between moments of sadness, God reminded me of the stories of joy.  My grandmother loved Jesus. It was evident in her every breath. When she wasn’t wandering the hallways of her Alabama home humming the tune of How Great Thou Art , she would be sitting at the piano rehearsing a hymn that her heart had memorized. She poured love into everything she did, including her homemade buttermilk biscuits that magically showed up at every meal of the day. She wore her love for Jesus in her smile. In nearly every photo, she is grinning from ear to ear.  She began a story of faith for my family. Her love of Jesus was contagious. My dad came to ...

I've been wounded for a long time. Woundedness has been my language and my grounds for operation. It’s how I’ve partially functioned in the last few years. As I began pastoral ministry in 2013, my naiveté convinced me that I was ready for whatever would come into my path. I thought I knew what I was doing. I did not. I failed miserably and burned some bridges in the process. I craved mutual love and was met with conditional tolerance. I was forced to conform to a specific ideal or teaching. To move beyond this concept was to subject oneself to scrutiny, isolation, and backlash. So, I reluctantly conformed; being internally convinced that faithfulness was akin to production. If I made the grades, then I was a faithful and obedient follower. And in any social experiment where you force a stubborn, hardheaded independent into conformity, ugliness bursts forth and continues to spew until the fountain is empty. I finally found the bottom of the pit. There was no acid to regu...