Beginnings

Thy mercy my God is the theme of my song, the joy of my heart and the boast of my tongue. Thy free grace alone from the first to the last has won my affections and bound my soul fast. Without Thy sweet mercy I could not live here. Sin would reduce me to utter despair. But through Thy free goodness my spirit's revived, and He that first made me still keeps me alive. Thy mercy is more than a match for my heart which wonders to feel its own hardness depart. Dissolved by Thy goodness I fall to the ground and weep for the praise of the mercy I found.
- Sandra McCracken

Compelling grace is not grace that is compelled by anything spectacular or praiseworthy in me but a grace bound solely in the covenant love of God that pushes me out of myself, toward others and into a broken world.

Pushing me out of myself is no light matter because I consume a lot of my thoughts. Pushing me toward others would be easy if it meant others to whom I am drawn or in some way find compelling. But more often, it is a pushing outward toward others who like me are messy, complicated, at times more self-absorbed than interested in the interests of others and needy of more than I feel resourced to give. The broken world is not a pessimistic view of the world but an honest acknowledgment that things like addiction, tribal conflict or gang violence, child abuse and trafficking, poverty, hunger, divorce, division, betrayal and so on not only exist but make life pretty terrifying for a lot of people.

When comfort and tidiness are of such high value to me, when self-preservation and the praise of men are too often my default mode guides, grace is the only thing that can compel me into the multi-dimensional realities of the world in which I live with the real and complicated people I encounter. And it turns out, this is good news indeed.