A friend of mine, Pam, is a bright person seeking to solve many of the challenges of our era. She’s doing good work for the right reasons in a graceful way.
Pam was visiting my daughter and there was a case of my wine on the kitchen counter. I purchased the wine online and my daughter had picked it up for me.
I’m still not sure what happened, but somehow Pam dropped a bottle of the wine onto the tile kitchen floor.
And it exploded. Usually a bottle just bounces back — wine bottles are remarkably rugged.
But this time the bottle dramatically shattered, and an explosion of wine mixed with glass splashed across the kitchen. Pam felt terrible about losing a bottle of my wine, and of course she was embarrassed about creating a mess in my daughter’s kitchen.
I just laughed when they told me. My daughter shrugged her shoulders, and her apartment had the aroma of a wine cave for a few weeks, but it was not a big deal.
So why do I tell you this story? Because it struck me how Pam is dedicated to social justice, to faithful obedience, to solving complex and perplexing challenges of the world. She’s a person who others perceive as bright, dedicated, a healer, a person with great skills.
But she has slippery hands. Stuff falls through and breaks. Sometimes in loud crashing ways.
We’re all like that, actually. We all try to do the very best for the world. We strive to do the right things, live justly, walk humbly.
But things still slip through our hands. Mistakes are made. The consequences are sometimes depressingly loud, messy, and unexpected.
Fortunately, we can live by grace. A bottle was dropped — the accidents of life — and it is our option to handle it with grace. Or not. Of course there are so many things more important than a bottle of wine, and that’s what I want to ponder in my reading for 2016.
This is a long way of introducing grace as a theme when I choose my books. Last year I read a book a month on the topic of hope, and this year I’m going to focus more on grace (let me know if you have suggestions).
Stay tuned. Oh, and don’t let Pam near your wine cellar.