Tuesday, February 26, 2008

A vision of grace, or poopy pants?

The only grace we can experience is the grace we can imagine.
--Toni Morrison, Beloved

Yep. I'll buy that. Though I believe I'm saved by grace through faith, there's another dimension to relationship with God in which my experience of that grace is dependent upon me. Which is a little bit of a problem today. Grumpy days, in my little world, diminish my vision in regard to the Big Picture and increase the likelihood that I'll either retreat to the corner to suck my thumb, or behave as if I have poopy pants. :-) I'm guessing that's true for other folks, too.

I wonder what God sees, looking at us. I mean, God would look through the eyes of love, right? (forgive me for the earworm potential there, any of you who lived through weddings in the '70s--ha ha ha) I imagine that God sees not just what we do, but what we intend, for better or worse. Loves us anyway, but there must be a number of dismayed forehead slaps involved, anthropomorphically speaking. "Jeez, kids, do you really have to learn this lesson again?"

It's easy to let God's love for us be a sentimental thing, as if each of us was God's firstborn 4-year-old dressed as a pumpkin in our first Thanksgiving pageant, but that's not what I mean. I think that God sees us in toto. God doesn't have the same egocentric position that we do, but rather can take in all angles of a situation instead of having to wed to one point of view. Some days, I really envy that perspective, 'cause the only one I can truly sustain is my own little one.

So...how to broaden the scope of our imaginations on the grumpy days? Gentle Reader, I open the floor to you...what works for you?

Namaste.

2 comments:

daisy said...

I shoot for gratitude to get myself out of my grumpy pants attitude. Usually it works.

Sometimes I remind myself I'm PMSing and that I've been this way before. And that I just might pass this way again. So not to sweat it too much.

I live near Mpls, too, and I'm so glad that the weather is going to warm up. We're in March, for crying out loud.

My son told me the average temperature at the beginning of March is about 10 degrees, and at the end of March, it's about 40. Yay March!

Choralgrrl said...

Amen, sister. Above zero is all it really takes to make me happy at this point, though!

See...working on the gratitude thing. ;-)