My Place Today...Grace in A Book...

I am at Dunn Brothers Coffee this morning in Maple Grove, drinking some coffee and doing some thinking as I prepare for my day. Not many thoughts today, I feel a little flat for some reason. A dryness of sorts and I have no explanation for it, perhaps the doldrums of life – the ebb and flow of living each day. All this I guess is to be expected and all can be a creative experience if learned from as Dallas Willard commented, “Nothing irredeemable has happened to us or can happen to us on our way to our destiny in God’s full world.” So I will move forward even if it feels more like creeping with intermingled lurching this morning.
Once in a moment of time that seems long ago and yet like yesterday a friend gave me a book during a trying and difficult time in my life and I am so thankful that my friend gave it to me. That book has been grace to me when I read it each morning and contemplate on the truths that are so eloquently unfolded in each word, sentence, paragraph…
When I read this book I am reminded of my friend and how God brought two lives and stories together so that they can be weaved into the larger narrative of life. When stories collide it is no accident but rather a compassionate favor of providence. Martin Buber’s estimation is true; “All actual life is encounter.” Grace is manifested both in the friendship and the love that can be shared when our hearts are open to the reality of what it means to be alive! Even in the simplicity of sharing words on a page of a book two souls can be united and connected in some mystical, inexpressible way that defies the natural and inevitable leads to somewhere. Somewhere beyond what can be imagined or hoped for, a place of grace that is in the moment, life in the now – neither trapped in the past nor longed for in the future. As T.S. Eliot wrote, “In order to arrive at what you are not, you must go through the way in which you are not.” This newness of circumstance is both blinding in the possibilities, yet frightening in its reality – it is out these two apparent contradictions that the nature of the beauty inherent in this new thing is revealed and beauty and truth are all we have as Keats knew long ago, “…truth is beauty and beauty truth…” and by being in the presence of beauty and truth these words from Kierkegaard begin to evolve, “Now with God’s help, I shall become myself.”