Grace and Faith

We live with faith and trust, or we live in hopelessness and despair.  Everything about life points to grace and faith.  None of us have anything to say about how we got here.  We did not choose our parents.  Neither did we choose our homeland.  Some say we choose our friends, but we are born with our family.  It is true enough.  Such things are not ours to decide.  Those who declare we are the master of our fate need to look again at the moment of beginning.  While it is true our choices have some bearing on where we go with our life, our beginning is not ours to choose.   

Some live long years and others hardly have years enough to count.  As surely as those whose lives are short wonder why old age is denied them, those in the older years wonder why they lived so long when so many lived so much less.  Life is not really about us.  We might try to frame it inside our choices, our will power, our self care, and a host of survival tactics, but in the end, life is about grace.  Grace is not something we earn.  It is not something guaranteed by good and right living.  It is a gift.  More specifically, it is a gift from God.  Though we may have questions we would like to ask Him, our life comes from Him, is sustained by Him, and as the Word declares, He does know the number of our years.  We are here and we live here because of God's grace.  

It is, of course, something which is not as provable as test tube experiments in a lab, but it is truth, nonetheless.  Not all things are visible in the present.  Actually, there may be more things invisible in our present moment than things which are visible.  Life is lived not in realm of the known, but in the realm of the unknown.  The writer of Hebrews wrote, "faith is the conviction of things not seen..."  (Hebrews 11:1).  Grace is what got us here.  Faith propels us forward.  It is the way which leads Home "to the better country."  (Hebrews 11:16)