Grace. (3 of 3)

[The last in a series of posts on Grace, excerpted from personal correspondence.]

"you can accept something with grace - like, without jealousy or anger or pride or vanity or whatnot."

-Right; I think that's true. This is a case of you extending grace to someone else, right: like taking someone's apology, when they have no way to force you to do it.

"can you struggle for grace? is it something to fight for?"

-I think you can struggle to give grace. But you can never struggle to receive it (because that would be earning it, making someone give you grace).
-But you can struggle with giving grace: because, like I said above, we're sinful. And because we're sinful, whatever we are supposed to do, we dislike doing; and whatever we're not supposed to do, we like doing. So, in the same way we were made to be like God, we were made to give grace; and, in the same way that we fail, daily, to be like God, we fail to give grace.

"if you have to fight for it is it somehow no longer grace?"

-I think it is still grace; the struggle, in the case of struggling to give grace, comes not because what you are giving is not truly grace; it comes because we, as flawed individuals, are unaccustomed to doing what is supposed to come naturally to us (in one of the analogies above: our lungs, filled with water, choke as we try to force in air).

"does it then equate to something akin to charity?"

-I think so. I think, really, that it all comes down to charity: our existence comes down to charity, to receiving something that is not ours to demand, but was, in God's abundance, God's to give.

"is that a totally irrelevant question if all of people's actions are a component of a god-given world?"

-I don't think it is. Yes, all of people's actions are a component of a God-given world; but just because we work within God's given framework doesn't mean that each individual action that we perform is directly licensed by and caused by God (if so, that's an incredibly messed-up version of a deity that I really don't want anything to do with). God created us with free will (if you want to talk about why, there's a whole separate discussion there), and I do think that us having free will is for the greater good. And I do think that God will, at the end of everything, make everything Right, for forever. But, in-between, there is a lot of us messing up, and God cleaning up after us, and us messing up again, etc.

Much love;

-jglc