Grace...

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Grace was one of the words we wrote about this evening.  A fifteen minute write.  Here's how mine turned out...with a minimal bit of editing.

Always a kid with 10 thumbs, two left feet, my brother's sarcastic "Grace" ringing in my ears.  "Tom boy...Caris is a tom boy!", but it seems to me, and seemed back then as well, that even tom boys have a certain amount of the ethereal thing that always escaped me.  You know--hitting a softball so hard, so far, so perfectly, it flies far beyond the boundary of the fence, arcing out toward the universe and eternity.

These days grace has taken on new meanings in my head.  "For gracious sakes, my grandmother used to say, her conversation so generously peppered with the word, the concept, the reality.

Grace comes at the most unexpected times, surprising and colorful, a glimpse of a humming bird through the dining room window earlier in the day.  She was irridescent grace herself.   Floating on wings beating more beats per second than I can quite imagine, she looks at me and moves back to the waiting flowers.

I suppose most deeply, I have known grace in the losses--I remember my friend Mark, who dropped one day, far away in some unknown restaurant, his heart given out on him at the age of 37.  Later that night Marsha called and told me the news, there in my seminary dorm, and a torrent of tears followed me to sleep that night as rain fell, bouncing on the pavement outside my window.  He came to me in my dreams.  I heard him before I saw him, as was almost always the case.  Where Marcus went, there was laughter.  In my dream our eyes met, and we laughed like children sharing our own private joke.  We held hands as we walked down to the Jordan River, that famous place, and Mark dove into water which shimmered in the sun.  I woke, his laughter echoing from my dreams.  And so I wiped away my tears that morning and got up to make bread, because that was something Marcus loved to do.  He was famous for his bread and his lasagne, his good humor, and the wonderful depth of conversation to be had over a cup of coffee...always a holy conversation.  Mark, whose life was colored with rainbows of grace shared it most generously with those of us who loved him and so very often, the stranger where he would always find the face of Christ.