grace for the gray days

 

It’s here. That long stretch of winter that is January and February, gray and thick and cold like murky pond water. Not a breath of wind stirs the fog from the valley; the mountains are shrouded beneath it like huge sleeping bodies. The trees are silent sentries, bony as skeletons, lifeless and still. It’s cold like death, in a way that makes every pain and fear in my heart throb harder.

So I stop, and in the dismal gray of winter I choose to find grace.

Grace: that God has given us His Word, and that daily I’ve been able to make time for its chapters. That I have a community of friends who are also believers and are reading alongside me, day by day, with a goal of having read the whole Bible by June. That words millennia old can still be relevant to me, here, now. That God is sovereign and good even when it doesn’t feel like it.

Grace: that I have a healthy brain and the will to use it. That I got to finish high school, to devour college-level algebra with A++ scores even though math is my weak subject, to spend a year studying the Bible. That even now I can choose to learn nearly anything because the Internet is available to me. That my brother and sister showed me a site called Duolingo, where I have learned 95 German words in only a few days and can speak in the sentences of a foreign tongue better than I could after a whole year of high school Spanish. That when God scattered the people and confused the tongues at Babel, He paved the way for words like “Entschuldigung,” which I can’t even say without smiling.

Grace: that my sister and I are such friends, and that even when swamped by her homework, she makes the time to watch an episode or two of Once Upon a Time with me in the evenings. That she understands my movie references and that we feud over whether Rumplestiltskin or Captain Hook is the more awesome villain, but are both in wholehearted agreement about the epicness of Loki and Darth Vader.

Grace: that I can run, jump, lift, and work out without getting exhausted. It wasn’t always that way; there have been whole chunks of my adult life when I was too sick and too weak to do much of anything without severe repercussions. But in the past few weeks I’ve found, finally, an energy that I haven’t had for a long time, and with it has come a joy in hard work and an optimism and confidence for every other area of my life.

Grace: that I have been blessed in so many ways, that God has orchestrated my life perfectly so that my path would cross with the paths of untold others who would have huge impacts on my life. That He made a young man perfectly imperfect enough to fit perfectly into my own imperfections. That He chose my parents and my siblings so that I would be molded into who I have become, that He sent me to Florida to meet the roommate I needed most so that I could later be changed by a community of other believers in PA who still give me prayer, counsel, happy memories, and many smiles from 2,500 miles away.

Grace. Grace that He knows all. That He cares about all. That He is the Source of joy, and that His love will never let me go.