Grace

 

I love funerals. Even when I barely know the person, I love them. I marvel as I watch people view the deceased through what I like to think of as, “the God Lens”. Flaws fall away, shortcomings subside and the beauty of what that person offered to their small corner of the world zooms into clear focus.

We laid my mom to rest this weekend. The soft rain behind her teary-eyed children’s tributes seemed to say the same thing. After a week of poring through pictures, journals, writings, paintings, and cross-stitched fabric, her life came into clearer and clearer focus for me. A ten-year-old Judie cross stitched, “Joy is an inside job,” 

and a more complex cross stitch finished much later read, “Flowers leave some of their fragrance in the hand that bestows them.”

A few weeks ago, my daughter posed this question, “I’m trying to be the best mom I can, yet I know that I am still falling short. How do I avoid that? How do I avoid them walking away from my home later in life and not blaming me for all of the unintended childhood trauma they might incur?”

Grace.

The single word that so profoundly changed my life as a young mom.

One day in my early twenties I was upset with something my mom had said to me. When counseling with Stephen about it he offered this thought, “Offer your parents the grace with which you want to be offered by your own children. Speak about your parents the way you want to be spoken of. You will teach them how to treat you by how you model it. Afford grace and you will receive grace.”

This work on myself over the last thirty years had nothing to do with what my parents deserved or what they offered me (though they deserved much and offered much). This work had everything to do with what lens I chose to view them through, the critics lens or the God lens. I look back now and see that this might have been the most underrated piece of advice I have ever been given. I’m not sure if any advice has altered the course of my life more which is why I felt compelled to pass it along. It wasn’t a stretch for me to see all the good in my mom as we memorialized her life, because she was good. But even more so, because I had practiced viewing her through that lens my entire adult life.

In the book ‘Original Grace’ by Adam Miller he speaks of the work his father did to redeem his own father who was an alcoholic his entire childhood. Through his father’s gentle kindness that he offered his own father, Adam comes to this conclusion,

“More than a year has passed now since my father’s death. Can I do for him the same work he was doing for his own father? Can I see, with unclouded eyes, all the good that he was, and be grateful? Can I, at the same time forgive him for needing, even from me, all the good he still needed? Can I forgive him, even, for leaving this life and, at least for a season leaving me?

Will my own children do the same? Will they forgive me? Will they be able to see what good I managed? Will they be able to forgive me for being what I am instead of what they needed? Will they go to work with the same deliberate care as my father to reclaim and redeem their father? God knows I need them to. Regardless of what I deserve, I hope and pray they will. There is no plan but grace.”

I don’t know a parent who doesn’t pray for their children to give them the grace they so desperately need. I actually don’t know anyone who doesn’t desire that from others. We often assign the work of grace to God as His work to redeem His children. But this week I was reminded that the work of grace is also an inside job. And that as I bestow that grace to others the fragrance will linger in my hands and the offering will transform my life.