On Being Loved When Deemed Unlovable

The offensive and otherworldly redeeming nature of grace

Photo by JR Korpa on Unsplash

I’m pretty sure I heard the phrase ‘the grace of God’ here and there throughout my entire life. And just like most churchey phrases, it became so familiar that it lost all meaning. It wasn’t until just a couple of years ago in my late thirties that I began (and am still merely beginning) to understand the implications of this phrase on real human life in this very existence.

Thanks to having found and being indoctrinated by the Lutheran tradition (it’s fine, I gave them permission), I quickly learned that grace is something they can’t ever stop talking about. But this time, the way they put it, this tired old word took on a new life in the way they were talking about it. I‌ started to see that grace isn’t just some simple, ephemeral, namby-pamby thing.

No…

Grace is a deeply radical theological concept. It’s one that reverses entire narratives. It shocks and even offends the most righteous of souls. Grace flips the conventional human narrative upside down, reaches into its guts, and turns it inside out. It’s something that sounds too good to be true by most reasonable standards. As some have said, if what is preached on Sunday doesn’t make the most devout of people nervous, grace was not being preached.