But it returns, it always comes back. No sooner do you get the counter clean that a chocolate covered toddler hand reaches up and you are back to square one.
That's life in a broken world isn't it? Trying hard to iron out our wrinkles and straighten our edges and the brokenness follows behind us making messes of things we once made clean. I feel it in my soul, this need to be clean, this desire to be good enough, to be enough. If I scrub hard enough, I can make myself clean, I can make things better. If I could just try harder I could be better, I could be enough.
The divine mystery, that Jesus gives his grace freely and without reservation to the bruised people in a broken world. As my daughter's children's bible aptly says "they were lovely, because He loved them."
Lovely, because He loved. Beloved. Important. Enough. Not because of what we do, not because we can put on a facade of cleanliness and order in our lives. Clean only because He washes us in the rains of grace.
I still scour and scrub and try. Its part of me, this need to be better. I'm learning. I am figuring out how to rest in his grace, to dance in the rain not cower in the storm. Because, who would give their life for someone not yet born, not yet even a thought in a mother's mind?
His ways are higher than ours. I want so badly to understand grace, and that is the problem. I don't know that we can fully grasp it, I don't know that God intended for us to be able to get it, to really get it. There is beauty in the mystery, a freedom to not have to know. To a weary soul there is respite in knowing Who loves you and fights on your behalf. Repose knowing you don't have to scour away the sin, that He has done it for you.
But by the grace of God, I'm learning.
