Graceful Living
It was a Saturday afternoon in 1986 when the phone rang and Alan asked, “Would you do a lesson on grace for Sunday School tomorrow?” Without thinking I said, “Sure.” And that was that. As I hung up the phone I was struck by a sense of panic, I had no idea what I’d be talking about.
I had recently turned my life around and had started following the way of Jesus. I’d been asked to help out with an older Sunday School class, but we didn’t use a curriculum, we just took an idea and went with it. Almost 40 years later I have a well developed practical and theological understanding of grace, in 1986 I had no idea what it was.
Not only was I clueless, there was no internet to help me out. It was Saturday and the library was closed. I was on my own and I needed to teach the kids something about grace the next day. My only resources were a Bible and a dictionary.
With no theological background to help me I struggled well into the night. I remember sitting at the desk in my bedroom not having a clue as to what I was doing. Then I had my “Aha!” moment. I would forget all about the word “grace” as a noun and focus on the adjective “graceful.”
The next morning I stood in front of the class and invited them to stand up and start to move around the room in a graceful manner. The look on Alan’s face clearly suggested that I had missed the mark on this one, but hey, I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t have the theological framework to say that grace was God’s unmerited favour. I knew I had been forgiven and was grateful for that, but I didn’t yet have the vocabulary to go with it.
As the kids danced around, light on their feet, expressing a sense of joy and freedom, smiles on their faces, laughter in their voices, and a twinkle in their eyes Alan said something to the effect of, “Well, I wasn’t expecting this.” Looking back of course he wasn’t expecting that. With decades of reading theology I now know what I was expected to have done. I was supposed to have opened the Bible to something like Ephesians 2 and explained to the kids the meaning of God’s grace.
Sitting in my office in 2024, surrounded by hundreds of books on theology and the Christian life, I smile at my decision in 1986. I asked the kids to be graceful. No theology, no biblical explanation, just be graceful in how you move around. It’s all I knew to do.
Perhaps my seventeen year old self was on to something. If an experience of grace doesn’t lead to graceful living, then what’s the point? Did we really experience grace? Surely living a graceful life is far more valuable than being able to provide a concise and articulate theological summary of grace.
The older I get the more I recognise that the way we live is more important than what we say we believe. For the way we live betrays what we truly believe.
Live a graceful life.
