Am I searching for grace? I thought I had found grace already in Jesus.
I have – in everything I am searching and questioning and re-evaluating, Jesus remains. That is my one refrain.
I believe the Gospel – I believe that there is something wrong with the world, something broken and not right. I believe we can not fix it on our own. I believe Jesus came to fix it, to restore everything to how it should be – and I believe I was created for relationship with him.
It’s just the everything else. It is the little Christian bubbles the Christians I know live in, it is the rejection of outsiders, it is the prescribed way to be a Christian, to be a woman, to start a church, to do ministry.
It is the preaching freedom from legalism up the front, but everything else about church making me feel trapped by rules and social conventions.
It is the lack of nuance, it is the ignoring of the third world church, the ignoring of the third world. It is Christians mocking the world and yet being too much like the world.
And for me – a woman, gifted with organisation, with teaching, with leadership skills – it is the question of women, more than anything else. It is the fact that I am a question, a problem, an issue, that debates must be had and books must be written before I can go about the business of serving God -that stops me in my tracks.
But all this does not make we want to walk away. Rather, I am determined to walk forward, into the mess. I want to come to conclusions – my own conclusions – that make sense, are biblical and I can live with. I want to be unafraid of choosing answers that are different to the answers held by those in my faith tradition. But I also want to be unafraid of choosing answers that are right, even if they are unpopular, uncomfortable or not the answers I wanted.
I have found grace in Jesus, and it is enough. Now I want to search for the life of grace.
Searching For Grace 