Finding Grace … Wherever

Finding Grace … Wherever

The title is mine, but the words will hopefully provide space for everyone to find a place in their lives to to feel better in their own lives. Having been enriched as such, will find time and light to spread the love of the Master over the periphery of their lives thus enriching the experience of people they engage with.

This is a major element of Jesus wandering ministry for some like the paralytic at Siloam and the blind man with the mud paste on his eyes it was a miraculous event, while for others it was initially a verbal event the Samaritan woman at the well that became a life changing story for an entire village.

It is easy to say that we are talking about Jesus sagas but one of the most challenging things in the entire New Testament is that Jesus in his farewell promises is that not only will He be with us but, but that we will do even greater things than Him. Now this is a claim that many, if not most of us, would tend to assign to the disciples and the apostles who came after them; not to we of the 21 century. But the challenge is why not, after all modernity provides the equipment to reach out to the world at large, remember the limitations that some who ask about why Jesus came in the time he did compared with the tech savvy time of today.

I guess that time tends to gloss over what we feel we are capable of in the light of history, after all who are we to think ourselves on any level with Jesus. He was the one who with a bunch of semi - illiterate, to use an Australian term yobbos, in three years and then the years following His death, “turned the world upside down.” The fact is that we are the equivalent to the disciples and apostles that He called on to follow Him.

I am not suggesting that we, you and I, should start doing what our historical examples did. The fact of the matter is that the Master may call some of us to take off and follow the footsteps of Jesus but for most of us we are part of a greater body who show Heaven on earth but the way we go about our days treating people in such a way that there may come a time that the recipients of our love and compassion come to ask “why” and our answer is then “Jesus. Remember the Samaritan woman went and brought her entire village back to meet “the man who told her all about her life”; we can have that affect on people we involve with our life.

Just to give a more modern example Arthur Stace. Arthur Stace you ask quizzically. Who is Arthur Stace. Well Arthur was the man who was semi illiterate in the early 1900s who after meeting Jesus spent the rest of his life chalking Sydney with one word “Eternity” in the most gracious copperplate. It was his response to Jesus and his new life; a hundred years later a lot of people are wearing the word on their clothes.

This piece is meant to open up options in the way we honour our Master but it is not prescriptive. If I have done my job it has shown a light on ways that you might open up your life to others so Jesus shines through your life; remember it is no longer you who lives but Jesus who lines in your life.