The season that we’re in is between Kindergarten and middle school age children. We’ve been married thirteen years, so we’re not newly weds and not yet aged. We’re in the mid years of paying off our mortgage, with fourteen years left to go. My car is well over 100k miles, nearly ten years old. Our dog still barks and leaps on company even though he’s trained and nearly six years old. I find myself needing to remember that this season is such a fleeting and precious place to encounter the all sufficient grace of Jesus Christ.

In the newborn throes of wake ups every hour, in the weeks that melted into those first few months as a new parent, I would catch my focus elsewhere. Especially with our first baby. I was only 22 and didn’t have the foresight to realize that when she was almost 13, I would see her toddler arms reaching up to hold me, while at the same time picturing her upcoming graduation. A slowing occurred when our second was born, I saw more of the days we were in while we were in them. By the time our third baby was born I was 30, and in those eight years the Lord grew the awareness in me that moments aren’t meant to “get through,” but that they are minute by minute opportunities to recognize God’s grace unfolding behind the scenes on a second by second basis.

When our third baby was born I prayed for the grace to endure just one more hour as the nights rolled out into one unyielding wave before us. I prayed in the morning for the grace to get my older kids through school for the day. I prayed for grace in the afternoon to get the house tidied and dinner on before their daddy got home, so we could rest as a family, and he could unburden from the stress of his day. The November that Ry was born was our first year homeschooling. The Lord brought me to this unyielding conviction the summer before the year of a global pandemic. When schools closed for COVID we were already well within our home routine. The kids knew there was something going on in the world, but their schedules didn’t change. Grace behind the scenes.

The thing about grace is that it is immeasurable, unfathomable, supplied in measures according to the needs of God’s children, extends behind and before us, and is part of the very nature of God. I know that God’s grace is part of who He is because it is the element of His character that prompted the cross, it was what God gave us in the form of His son that we didn’t deserve and could not have obtained on our own. Grace that is greater than all my sin.

There are certain hypothetical outcomes that I don’t know how I would endure if you asked me on the spot. My husband being killed on the way home from work. One of our children being taken. Waking up in the night to the smell of smoke and flames licking at our bedroom doors. The scream of metal crunching beneath the weight of collision and one of our children being non-responsive. I do not know how I would endure these things if they happened today.

But, I do know that if any of those things did happen, that God’s grace would be sufficient. It has already sustained me through death, through loss, through heartache. It sustained me as one of our children tore loose from my womb and passed on the white sheets of a hospital bed. It sustained me through the death of my grandparents, it sustained me through sexual abuse, it sustained me through an alcohol addiction that resulted in extreme loss for me and my family, and it is sustaining me in the rebuilding of our life as God is shaping and remaking our future into a picture that we don’t yet see. The grace of God reached down into my life, at a point where nothing I could do nothing, and saved me from hopeless and devastating circumstances. It is God’s grace that one day I will stand before the Father, redeemed by the blood of Jesus, and rather than be dismissed from His presence for judgement, I will be received into His presence because of what Christ has done. It was grace that the spirit activated salvation in my heart and it is grace that keeps me in the fold of God. His grace is sufficient.

The apostle Paul made a career of persecuting the early church and murdering Christians before an encounter with Jesus turned his life in an about face. After years of serving Christ, years of facing persecution of his own, imprisoned, and suffering from an unnamed source, he writes in 2 Corinthians 12:9, “And He {the Spirit} said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for My strength is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore most gladly I will rather boast in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me.” The measure of grace meets the measure of our need. Every time.

If you don’t know the grace of God, today is the day of salvation. Receive Jesus. No matter where you are in your life, no matter what you’ve done, God’s grace is sufficient for you.

God bless.