Parakalein

As I was imagining how Adam and Eve must have felt after "they sinned".  I began to imagine how I was not happy as a father when my children did something that really disappointed me.  When I think back I was more concerned for what people would say or think about me than I was understanding that my children were just being kids, just growing up, just challenging everything and my challenge was to love them through it all and watch them grow through their mistakes knowing that regardless of anything their dad would always love them.  It was not about me it was about them.  Father's feel so much of the pressure of providing for their kids and family, protecting them form cruelties in the world, preparing them for disappointments, training them to read and write and to live in God's love and grace.  Protecting, providing, and preparing we can look with a frown when our kids make mistakes.  So I have begun to think that God is more like a Grandfather, a father of all ages, who looks at all of us with a smile of love and grace.  It is not approval as if what Adam and Eve did or what I do or do not do, does not matter.  It is the smile of a Grandfather that says, "you will get it I know you will, your mistakes of today are the things that will help you to learn and grow into tomorrow, just know regardless of anything I love you".

 God who is never surprised by anything but responds in love to everything is more like a relaxed grandfather than an uptight stressed father.

Imagine if Adam and Eve knew that regardless, God would never leave them alone, would never stop loving them, that God would love them through and into their tomorrows.  Maybe instead of going int o hiding, instead of grief and loss, blame and shame, they saw the light of God's love rather than the darkness of their own despair.

What if we saw that they fell not from grace but into grace.  They fell not from the hollow of God's hand but into the hole of God's loving arms.  What a different world, a world where we fall into grace rather than blaming others and shaming ourselves.

The Garden of Grace is where the fruit of the Spirit grows.

Thanks Grandpa, for the smile that sees beyond the moment of failure into the movements of grace.