Lessons in grace

You're never too young -- or old -- to learn

One of my favorite narratives about the word grace comes from the book Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith, in which author Anne Lamott sums it up as follows:

It is unearned love – the love that goes before, that greets us on the way. It’s the help you receive when you have no bright ideas left, when you are empty and desperate and have discovered that your best thinking and most charming charm have failed you. Grace is the light or electricity or juice or breeze that takes you from that isolated place and puts you with others who are as startled and embarrassed and eventually grateful as you are to be there.

For those of the Christian faith, grace is a key component of our belief system. And while Lamott is no theologian, neither am I, and this sums it up as well as anything I have read or heard.

I am always surprised when I hear people say they grew up in church but never heard about grace. In the United Methodist Church of my youth, I knew of it in abundance. I well remember the acrostic, God’s Riches At Christ’s Expense.  

In the non-denominational church of my adulthood, grace has always been a matter of great emphasis. I can’t imagine being a Christ-follower without an understanding of grace.  

In John’s gospel, he wrote, “For of his fulness we have all received, and grace upon grace.”

With the disclaimer of not being a theologian, I think that means grace keeps accumulating. It never runs out. Grace upon grace.  

I had a recent conversation on the subject with my six-year-old grandson Cap.

For reasons about which I will share more in a later installment, Susan and I have been spending some extended time at Cap’s home in Huntsville with him, his sister Mary Brooks, his brother Walt and his parents (our daughter Maggie and son-in-law Ben).

One night after all the little ones had gone to bed, we were helping Maggie prepare for the next day. Each day Cap, a first-grader, brings home a folder in his backpack with information from the school. Parents are responsible for looking at everything, signing papers if needed, and getting the folder back in the backpack for the next day.

That night she found a note from Cap’s teacher saying he had not returned a library book, and it was time to either return it or pay for it, to the tune of twenty dollars.

Maggie said she knew the book had been missing. They had been looking high and low and could not find it. She expressed no small amount of frustration over the lost book and the cost to replace it.

I took a twenty-dollar bill from my pocket and handed it to her.

She said that was fine, but Cap needed to know I was doing that. She explained to me, as if I had never raised a child, how he needed to learn responsibility.

“Put the twenty bucks in the folder,” I told her.  “I will address it with him.”

With a sigh, she thanked me and accepted the bill.

Here is where I will pause and tell you how neither Cap, his brother and sister, nor his cousins, who account for all my grandchildren, can do anything wrong in my estimation.

If this had been one of my own children years ago when they were in school, I would have given an awe-inspiring speech on the importance of learning responsibility, something along the lines of “I won’t always be around to take care of these things.”

As a grandfather, however, I have the privilege of bypassing all of that with my grandchildren.

But I had promised Maggie I would talk to Cap about the library book.

The next morning before taking him to school, while it was only the two of us there, I asked him about it.  

He looked at me with his big brown eyes and told me he had lost the library book. I told him I knew that, and then I asked him if he knew what grace was.

“Is it like love?” he asked.

And I told him that is exactly what it is, and because I love him, I was going to give him the money to pay for the lost library book.

I told him how important it is to keep up with things. (I thought he was a little young for the word “responsible.”) But I also told him I know he does not make a practice of losing things, and I know what a good boy he is.

I probably should have left out that last part because his mother had wanted me to drive home the lesson of responsibility. Also, I suppose telling him he is “good” kind of weakens my lesson on grace, since it is, as Anne Lamott put it, unearned love.

But again, I am not knowledgeable in the area of theology, so I get a pass. (And believe me, Cap has never had to do anything to earn my love and admiration.)

Cap thanked me but did not say anything else about the library book or my taking care of the cost. I drove him to school, talking and laughing with him as usual. As far as I was concerned, the matter was closed.

But a couple of weeks later when I was home, my phone rang. It was Maggie.

“Cap has something he wants to tell you,” she said.

“GrandBob, I found the library book!” he exclaimed. “And I got twenty dollars back!”

It turns out the book was in the room where he goes for after-school care.

He then proceeded to tell me what he might do with the twenty dollars.

And I would not have dreamed of asking him to return it to me. The same grace that bought the library book gave him twenty dollars to keep.

Grace upon grace.