frustrations with grace

This semester is so busy for me, almost overwhelming. I have a bad habit of biting off more than I can chew. :s Oh well, the unnecesary challenges I seem unable (unwilling?) to avoid make my life more interesting.

Immanuel Fellowship has been talking about grace and sanctification for about a month now. It was the focus of the retreat we had in October, been talked about on Sundays both before and after the retreat, and we’ve been talking about it a lot in housechurches. It’s been really good stuff, the grace to come to God after you’ve screwed up and the grace to stop sinning have been the main things talked about.

For me though it’s been really frustrating. When I was little I used to have this toy. It was similar to a hard, hollow, plastic ball, only it had all these holes cut in it. The holes were all different shapes, there was a star-shaped hole, a square hole, a diamond hole….you get the picture. The point of the toy was for the little kid to learn shapes by fitting these blocks through the holes, there was a star-shaped block, a square block, a diamond block….you get the picture. The thing about this toy is that the star-shaped block only fit through the star-shaped hole, the square block only fit the square hole, and the diamond block only fit the dimond hole. I watched this toy frustrate many a small child in my mother’s daycare. The little ones always thought that they could get the blocks to go through just any old hole.

Why am I talking about this childhood toy? Because this toy has a lot to do with my frustration over the concept of grace. See I feel like my little heart has all these different shaped holes cut into it. The really agrivating thing is that somewhere along the way someone forgot to cut me a grace-shaped hole. So I can see grace and I understand it with my mind but my heart has no way to allow it in. Another way of putting it is that I feel like a man blind from birth. I could read books upon books about colors but never really have any idea of what they actually are or what it feels like to see a painting so beautiful that it takes your breath away. So I’m frustrated and feeling a little desperate.