Common Grace

      My daughter is always finding four-leaf clovers. I mean all the time. She has an eye for it, so much that it’s almost commonplace. At least to us.

Each time she comes tearing into the house with another, she’s wild with excitement. “Can you believe we have so many four-leaf clovers? We must have the luckiest yard in the world!”

Nothing in life is wasted on this child.

“Mom! Come quick!” I rush out to the living room expecting chaos and destruction. Instead I find her, face squashed against smudged glass. “Isn’t that the pinkest, most breathtaking sunset you’ve ever seen, I mean like ever? I didn’t want you to miss a second of it!”

And first thing every morning, rain or shine, she’s barefoot out on the deck. “I just have to breathe the air, Mom.”

My little one seems to have inherited her sister’s joie de vivre. I caught her standing on the back of the couch the other day, pounding on the window and yelling, “Look! Look at the spider! It has a shiny web!” Rapture over a dewy bug.

And here I am grumbling because I forgot to put coffee in the filter basket before trying to brew a pot.

I wonder how much magic I would find, how much beauty would bloom in front of my dull eyes if I could step for a moment back in to the skin of a child. If I could see the world like my daughters do, these creatures who are able to wring poetry from every moment.

How much grace I miss in my rush to do.

The sun warms the bones of the evil and the good, and rain, liquid mercy, falls on the just and unjust. Grace is all around us, in the air we breathe, the food we eat, the love we give and take.

We swim in grace so deep and thick, so abundant, that we forget it’s all evidence of God’s love.

    Grace is common, never ordinary.

His kisses on the breath of the wind, his whispers in the voice of the waves. He is here, singing a love song over us.

The melody, the glory is there if we can pause long enough to notice it. To let the perfection of one second sink in and give us goosebumps and leave us breathless and remind us that God has not forgotten this world, even in the little things.

Little things like bare feet and spider webs and sunsets and four-leaf clovers and children who see it all better than I do.

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Scripture taken from Matthew 5:45