The Possibility of Pain

Wedding planning just officially hit DefCon 2. Alarms are starting to sound, obligations are starting to be named, stresses are starting to surmount and tears are starting to fall – at least on Jennifer’s side. I hear that is expected to happen, but it often boggles my mind as to what small daily event may trigger it. There I go thinking male again… it’s not an event, it’s “everything.” Someday I will learn.
Things are not really any different than they were a week ago aside from that – at least the situation isn’t really any different. We’ve both been able to express our grief, frustration, what-have-you a little more succinctly. Emotionally, for me at least the place in life I now find myself seems as though it has begun to coalesce. At least, that is, until something else happens.
We have been learning a lot about grace though. Hard lessons, and hard fought for, but of a purity, rarity, and clarity like few you find dwelling in the sun on the surface. Recently I have been caught up in the parable of the wicked servant, stuck on how much I have been given – even in a season that looks like it might just take away (or at least severely threaten) so much. I worked out about how much the servant owed his Master. It’s around 12 billion dollars, give or take or, in more literal terms, about 160,000 years of a servant’s one denarius’s a day wages. There really aren’t enough lifetimes to live to make yourself square with the house, and you really should consider every chip and card you’re given a blessing. A debt has been paid on my behalf, a wrath and penalty absorbed I could never have brokered for myself. This is the lesson Jennifer and I are now learning in small measures every day; every day we’re reminded that we’re not entitled to even that day being worked out for the better, even though most do.
The possibility of pain is a strange teacher. It warns us of the Hell we’re owed, and the grace we’re given and it can be such an efficient method of delivering its message. Now I see how much I take advantage, how much I assumed had been granted to me. Now, there’s fewer and fewer times I look at Jennifer and am not thankful, and there’s more and more times I notice it when I’m thankless.
The servant didn’t get it. He didn’t even seem to acknowledge his unbelievable debt being removed from being his responsibility. He wasn’t changed by it. He went right on, demanding what he was owed from someone that was indebted to him. He even choked the poor soul. I get it, but I’d be a liar if I didn’t acknowledge just how close I am to that man some days. Things are too busy. Too many people want too much of you, from you, and with you. That’s where that lovely aforementioned teacher comes back in. A prick here or there and you’re right back in slow-motion, sucking the wound it just gave you to remind you to cherish what you have- learning the lessons you should have been learning all along. It is no longer a wonder to me why God ordains suffering to enliven the saints, and my case isn’t anything by comparison to some tales I know, yet. It certainly isn’t finished yet by any means.
I could lose my mom. In my family, that’d be like losing gravity next time you stepped outside. At the very least we’re going to get front row seats to pain’s display of many lesions on behalf of the one Who says He’s doing it for our better and to make us more like Him. So many things could go wrong, and you’ve no guarantee from one moment to the next that they won’t. Yet, in our situation, neither one of us would dare say that we don’t feel held. Such is the beautiful subtlety of grace in the hands of a master surgeon – cutting away what would destroy us and piecing us together when we would otherwise be simply broken.