Life, a Lake, and a Lesson in Grace

Earlier this year, our District Superintendent, John Tucker, sponsored an essay contest around the question, "What is your understanding of humanity, and the human need for divine grace?" The idea was to address this question without a lot of theological jargon, and to develop new ways to address this question that are more accessible to the average person on the street, or in the pew.

My essay was not chosen, but I'd like to share it with you anyway. Let me know what you think about it.

Life, a Lake, and a Lesson in Grace

I sit on a rock at the edge of Wallowa Lake. It is a perfect rock to sit cross-legged on and meditate. It is a huge granite boulder, scraped out of the Wallowa Mountain Range by the glacier that covered this area during the last Ice Age, and deposited by the northern edge of the glacial gouge in the earth that became Wallowa Lake. It has a gentle indentation that perfectly fits my butt cheeks when I sit on it, sort of like those old seats on my grandfather’s tractors. I come here often after my divorce – a second divorce for me. I come to sit, to listen, to gaze upon the serene beauty of this lake, the moraines that cradle it, gaze into its pristine, crystal-clear water, and listen to the call of geese carried along on the breeze. It is a feeling of serene peace, a taste of perfection.

As I sit, I ponder this strange word, “perfection.” Jesus says, “Be perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfect.” Being of a perfectionist strain as it is, that command, or at least admonition, of Jesus always stings a bit. How can I be perfect like my “Father in Heaven?” No one can be like God! I especially feel this distance from any sort of perfection as I sit at the water’s edge tending to the wounds and lessons of my divorce. What went wrong? What did I fail to do to keep the marriage intact? I think of times when I could have said something that might have made a positive difference, but I chose to speak from a sense of being wounded or anger or defensiveness. I think of opportunities where I knew what I should have done, but chose to do the opposite, or at least chose another path to take. 
This makes me think of all the times I knew what I should have done, but chose not to do it. Or, that I knew what I shouldn’t do, but did it anyway. Sometimes just for the delicious taste of the hurt it caused, or turmoil it spawned. The words of the old confessional come to mind: doing the things I ought not to have done, and not doing the things I ought to have done. Omission and commission. I have a lot of those. So how can I ever hope to be perfect as my “Father in Heaven?” 


As I ponder this, I spy an osprey circling overhead suddenly twist and dive towards the lake surface, make a perfect hyperbolic curve as it skims the surface to reach down and grab a fish that ventured too close to the surface. It is perfection itself. The osprey functions completely as it has been created to function: visual acuity to see fish beneath the water’s surface, musculature to shift bone and feather into just the right configuration to catch the wind and then plummet like a bomb, eye-talon coordination so precise that it barely even gets wet in procuring dinner.

Then it strikes me: this is the perfection Jesus is talking about – to engage life fully with all my created abilities and potentialities. The osprey acts entirely like an osprey should, and is capable of acting. The lake is a perfect mountain lake, the moraines and mountains beyond rise up from the ground in just the way mountains should, as in the Genesis beginning, when all things came into being, and God pronounces them “Good.” Good. Being as they should be, fulfilling their purposes, exercising their potentials, playing with their possibilities. 

As a human creature, the range of my possibilities and potentials is vast. And this range is carved, shaped, and punctuated by the freedom of choosing: to do or not to do, even to be or not to be. As I choose, so often I also stumble, fall, neglect, wound, destroy. I may even aim my intentions accurately, but the arrow of my actions still often fall short. Discouragement, despair, self-recrimination, lamentations spring forth from me. Can I never measure up? Does the arrow fallen short of its target define my life, describe my soul, circumscribe my destiny?


But then, the lake calls to me again. The cloud-besotted sky, the sotto voce whispering of the trees, the clarion calls of the geese rising on wing. These things being their created selves, simple expressions of being itself, in all its givenness, call out to me as gifts. Gifts of creation, given by a gifting Creator, who doesn’t wait for me to measure up, to hit an unreachable mark every time, but comes graciously to me in every breath I take. 
I sit. 
I breathe. 
I rest in the unconditional love I can never earn, and have done nothing to deserve. 
And I am reborn.