Recently an older man recounted to me his experience of leaving a small town in West Tennessee in the early 1950s to seek an athletic scholarship at a junior college in the Mississippi Delta.
After a couple of weeks of intense two-a-day practices in the swampy July heat of a Mississippi summer, the young man decided he had seen enough. Without any money, he called his parents late one evening to tell them he would come home and go to work instead of attending college. He would leave the next morning- hitchhiking back to Tennessee, and they could expect him home in a couple of days. He told the coach and his prospective teammates of his plan before lying down for the night.
After a few hours of fitful sleep, he felt himself being roused from his bunk for what he assumed was the normal 5 AM practice.
“I told y’all, I made up my mind. I am not going to stay here. I am going to go home in the morning.”
This man’s eyes glisten even seven decades later as he recounts the moment:
The thing was it wasn’t the coach at all. It was Daddy. He said, “Come on now, son, and get up, we’ve come to take you home.” He never said nothing about it one way or the other, but he must have gotten together the gas money, left right after I called, and drove all that way through the night to get me. He never made me sorry I went or that I didn’t stay. He actually never said anything about it again- he just came and got me and brought me home.
So often in life, we take on more than we can handle- sometimes things that are wrong in themselves, but perhaps just as often, we tackle right things at the wrong time. When we reach our breaking point, we often think all that awaits us is a lecture, a criticism, or an “I told you so.”
The people around us certainly do respond that way at times. It seems so easy to see the errors and missteps in others’ lives- even as it often is so difficult to recognize them in our own.
But our God is different.
He is a Good Father that extends grace to us when we cannot see the clear way home. We are the ones who prepare speeches, practice talking points, and seek to bargain our way back into favor- He is the one who runs to us and lavishly extends welcome and grace (Lk 15).
Like our Father, Jesus, our beloved elder Brother, doesn’t make us try to figure out how to hitchhike up to Him to heaven, but instead humbly comes to us and extends compassion and models a new, better way of living (Phil 2:5-11).
The Spirit and the Scriptures are living and active forces in our lives- lifting our words higher in prayer (Rom 8:26) and guiding our steps day by day as we journey through this life (Ps 119:105).
That homesick teenager graciously brought back home almost 70 years ago, married the sweet beauty queen from the rival high school, built a local business through honesty and hard work, raised two children, and eventually became my grandfather.
He never earned that college degree, but his four grandkids each did, and we went on to have multiple advanced degrees between us- in education, business, pharmacy, and ministry.
He taught us all more life lessons by his example than he ever could have with any amount of higher education- quizzing us on our multiplication prowess at the dinner table, refusing to let us win at a game of H-O-R-S-E, serving with integrity in public office in a small town for decades, and loving each of us just as we were in all the highs and lows of life.
I give thanks that my great-grandfather who I don’t remember drove through the night down to the Delta and to bring home a homesick boy who would grow into a man I will never forget. Because he showed up with love rather than a lecture, that single act of grace lives on, and an entire family exists and our individual stories are unfolding as lives that are committed to growing in grace.
Grace is like that- unearned, undeserved, and most often, unexpected.
In life, sometimes we all need some correction, but we always need more grace.
Grace begets grace, and when we offer grace to one other, we are growing to be more and more like our faithful Father.
No act of grace, however small it seems, is ever wasted in the Father’s will.
Last night, shedding his earthly tent battered by years of toil and broken by recent sickness, my grandfather took his final breath here, and passed into the presence of the great cloud of witnesses and embrace of our Good Father. Like a boat slipping into the water in the pre-dawn stillness of his beloved Kentucky Lake, he left us here and went on to his reward.
We grieve today, but by the grace of the same Good Father, we know some day we will be united in a better land where every sickness ceases, death divides no more, and all who are weary are at rest.
We are thankful that, while we sorrow now, it is a sorrow drenched in the promises of our Good Father and in the hope of better things to come (1 Thes 4:13-18).
will norrid writes 