Seasons and Grace...

“There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heaven…”
~ Ecclesiastes 3:1 TNIV

“A season for every activity…” – these words really struck me about a week ago. The whole notion of seasons of life, seasons of our stories, that we all must experience and encounter along our life journeys if we are to be fully alive and human.

Last Sunday night I was at the “Love Tells the Story” tour listening to Donald Miller, Sandra McCracken, Derek Webb and the Robbie Sealy Band. Derek Webb made a comment while introducing one of his songs that sparked this line of thinking about seasons in my mind. He talked about how we have seasons in our lives and in them all God’s love, faithfulness, and grace is still complete and full for each of us, even if we find ourselves in a “season of sin.” This phrase was interesting to me because I at first wondered when any of us are not in a season of sin. Or put another way, really free from the “deceptive state of being” – regardless of how we choose to think about the sin question it does not suspend God’s love through a sin season nor any other season.

Perhaps, “a season of sin” could be described as an intense season of sin (what the prodigal son experienced) – like the monsoon season? Intense rain for a brief time and then a break, a reprieve, a change and spark of transformation that moves us from a one season to another with new possibilities and a rainbow of hope (again what the prodigal son experienced). Brennan Manning speaks of how there is nothing we can do or not do that will make God love us more or less. God is not fickle in his relationship with us as we are in our relationships with others or him.

Seasons, times, moments of our lives, our stories, in the many scenes of it all, “… hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us…” (Romans 5:5 NIV) and Paul continues, “You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly….But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:6, 8). This is true for everyone, everywhere, all of us, all of us; his love is full of compassion. We all have the imprint of God – the Imago Dei.

Can we, could we ever know the depths of grace other than being in the depths of sin? I am reminded of something Anne Lamott wrote about this very question, “I realized just then that sin and grace are not opposites, but partners…” or as Paul wrote, “But where sin increased, grace increased all the more…” (Romans 5:20). Sin can never out run grace – a season of sin cannot outrun grace for we are always in a season of grace. Grace is what looms large over all our stories – is the expression of the heart of God. The umbrella over all of our lives – it is not possible to love more than God, hence Calvary.