will Grace suffice?

Hazaiah Kenneth

arrived on Thursday evening

August 18, 2011

weighing a surprising nine pounds and an ounce

measuring twenty-one inches long

God decided.  our family would grow this year.  God decided.  my pregnancy would bring new challenges, new blessings.  God decided.  i would carry this baby full term and he'd be healthy, the biggest yet.

God decided...

ultimately, Only God decides.  and that's the meaning of Hazaiah's name:  the Lord has seen and he decides.  also this: seeing the Lord and believing his decisions.  Hazaiah means to see what Sovereign God has done, to see what he is doing, and to trust it all.  the Good of it all.

this is what God keeps teaching and deeper and deeper goes our trust.  it's not because we're becoming greater and greater, only that he's decided to take us deeper.  into his Grace.  and by his Grace alone we are learning.  with every year we live, every child we're given, every endeavor he leads us into, we find there's more and more we've got to learn.  that's where Grace deepens, as deeper goes the awareness of our need for it.

grace, in fact, is not the first word i'd use to describe our recent days.  more of the waiting combines with postpartum challenges.  recovery is taking longer and the house is getting messier.  even though i can do little homemaking, school's in and kenn is working more outside our home.  too often, sleep deprivation means short tempers and exaggerated emotions.  most often, i am wishing i could get up and get to work: clean the dirt, implement order, corral the kids (and us adults) back to peaceful...

but God decides i am still here 

still needing to say no

  still needing to let go

  still needing Strength 

that from me will never come

  and still needing Grace 

to pardon

i like to read C. H. Spurgeon's Morning and Evening.  today's reflection is taken from Leviticus 13:13, where the law states that a man is declared clean only when his body is found entirely covered with leprosy, head to toe.  here's part of Spurgeon's thoughts on the verse:

"we, too, are lepers, and may read the law of leper as applicable to ourselves.  when a man sees himself to be altogether lost and ruined, covered all over with the defilement of sin, and no part free from pollution, when he disclaims all righteousness of his own, and pleads guilty before the Lord, then he is clean through the blood of Jesus, and the grace of God." 

i needed Jesus to save my life and now i need him in order to live it.  you may have read in previous blogs about God calling me to rest long before my time on bed rest.  it's been close to a year that this particular season of slow has been upon me.  and i've been questioning the Good.  defeat overcomes in this time of feeling hands are tied and of crying, "how long?". but it's the feeling of defeat that ties my hands and it's admitting i really am helpless that sets me free. it frees me to trust in God's decisions and to trust the Good in it all.  only then am i free to act, even when (perhaps especially when) such acting feels like inaction.

"...he said to me, 'My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.' That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong. Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me."  (2 Corinthians 12:9,10)

so be it.