The Weight of a Thing

Shocking confession: About a month before I was married to my husband, I went on a date with another man.

Dumbest. Decision. Ever.

For many of you readers out there that have the privilege of knowing my husband, you know him to be incredibly loyal and loving; an honest man with a penchant for telling things like they are. He’s a doting father to our daughter and he loves me well, with extraordinary patience and kindness. These traits were very visible all the way through our relationship, from friendship to dating to engagement.

So to say we were both flabbergasted at the whole situation is an understatement. He was confused as to why someone would do something like this one month out, and I was confused at why I was feeling this way. To make things more complicated, we were in a long-distance relationship at the time, so he couldn’t come marching into the restaurant to physically express his frustration and anger.

The only saving grace was the honesty with which I did this hurtful thing. I was very up front about the fact that I was heading out with some other guy just to ‘see what was happening’. I was messaging my soon-to-be-husband the whole time, trying to explain what was going on in my head. But it didn’t numb the pain of the cut.

That night after I arrived home and for most of the following week, we talked it through, sometimes heatedly and sometimes logically. After this, my husband did something that changed the course of our lives indefinitely.

He showed me grace.

Grace is quite a feminine word, don’t you think? When I think of grace, I think of the colour white, and the image of a feather slowly floating to the floor. It’s a name we give our daughters and not our sons, and when using it to describe the Christian God, it seems to balance out other more ‘masculine’ traits.

However, when I think of the strength it took for my husband to show grace to me during this particular event, it doesn’t seem like a soft thing. It was a courageous thing, a huge risk.

Grace...is a name we give our daughters and not our sons, and when using it to describe the Christian God, it seems to balance out other more 'masculine' traits.

It was a weighty thing. A heavy grace.

I stepped into that marriage a month later so very grateful and determined to prove that his trust in me was worth it. The grace he had shown was calling to the good in me, drawing it out. Grace does that, it chooses to see the good in a person and calls it out in them.

One of the reasons I’m here on the mission field is the very same call to the heart.

All my life I have been shown grace by my God. I was born into a home that showed me love, and lots of it. We were all raised knowing we were loved by our parents, by God, and that out of all the gods we could have been born under, this one loved so deeply that he died for us. Want to hear the kicker? Time and time again I rejected this God. 1000 times I rejected him, but 1001 times he was there, showing me grace, calling out the good in me.

What do you do with that kind of persistent love?

And what do you do when you see that others are seemingly not afforded this same opportunity?

It’s hard to theologically sum up how it feels to be loved and offered opportunities like this, while simultaneously holding that others are born into families that hate them, in worlds that don’t even offer them the knowledge that a sacrificial God exists. But the downside of God giving us free choice is that people can choose to selfishly hold good to themselves, at the cost of others. How do we weigh that out?

It’s hard to theologically sum up how it feels to be loved and offered opportunities like this, while simultaneously holding that other’s aren’t afforded the same grace.

There’s a commonly told story in the Bible that I want to highlight. Three men are given money by their boss. He asks them to look after it while he’s away, and when he comes back he asks for an account as to how it was utilised. Two men have done well and doubled it, and one man has buried it to keep it safe. The harsh part? The first two men have passed the test, and the last man has failed. The obvious point we get out of this story is that we are not only called to keep the investment safe but we’re also meant to utilise it. But what I want to highlight is that these men were given the money to begin with. And it wasn’t an even amount. One man was given $1,000,000, one $500,000, and one $100,000.

We have all been given grace. Some more than others. We haven’t done anything to earn it, but whatever has been allocated to us, we’re called to account for. Grace has been given, what are we going to do with it? Something is being called out of us.

When my husband afforded me grace at that moment, he was trusting me to utilise it and not to abuse it. I had to utilise the grace I was given, maximise my potential, and love that man so well. I was being called out to be something more, and he was silently asking me not to waste the costly gift that was being handed to me.

In the same way, we have all been afforded grace by God. I’ve been given a lot of it whereas some others, for some reason, are only afforded a little. But to whom much is given, much is required.

The weight of a thing.

The weight of grace.

So today I want to challenge you. Are you one of the ones to whom much has been given? Have you been afforded the privilege of knowing about the only God in history who actually died for the people he created? Don’t bury that grace, utilise it, it’s calling out the good in you. It’s a heavy grace, but it’s the lightest burden I’ve ever had the privilege of carrying.

P.S. I’m still married, coming up 14 years, and it was the best gift I’ve ever been given.