Two Worlds

"Change is inevitable--except from a vending machine".-Robert C. Gallagher

There I was, doing my scheduled trip to work, but across a terrain entirely different to normal. A sudden substantial drop in the temperature the evening before had swiftly adjusted the routine rain into snow, and although it hadn't lasted very long, it had left a frozen system of roads and pavements.

Doing things that had been commonplace the day before suddenly became dangerous, and the busy rush to work had become a very slow, thin trickle of people and vehicles.
What a difference just one change can make.

In a few hours, the world had been shifted.

Then, I reached the city, and it was as though I'd been mistaken - the roads here were free of any frost and ice, and it looked just like it did the day before.

Two very different worlds very close to each other, each requiring a different way of thinking, of behaving, to use them without harm.

We encounter such changes without thinking, at least until the impact on us is direct and immediate, but such sharp turns should make us think.

When a moment happens suddenly like yesterday, you have to adapt quickly to continue doing what's required, but there are far more subtle changes happening around us every moment of every day that, when they reach a tipping point, can result in an entire world becoming opened or closed to us, at both the smallest and largest of levels. 
A relationship is suddenly begun or lost because two people see each other differently, businesses rise and fall through particular choices or what we deem to be free choices become defined by subtle analysis of our prior decisions, so we begin to be 'directed' by specific forms of media or other controls. Change generally means something quite radical happening to us and our world, but how can we be sure it's for our good?

When we think about just one strand of life - say, the differences between the sexes - we quickly begin to notice that these may often be subtle, but they are inherently there. When changes that seek to deny these realties are imposed (think Russia in the 1920s), they fail, even if there's huge ideological momentum behind them, because they deny something far more important about us.

Change cannot usually erase or adjust for the better what we are at our core. For that kind of change, you need something impacting upon us that is far greater than dogma or stronger than gravity. You need grace.

Grace has the kind of strength delivered by a hurricane, but the gentleness of a nursing mother. Grace has the depth and height of the most breathtaking natural wonder you've encountered (or all of them combined), but the tenderness to speak tenderly to the most troubled conscience.

Our world is often a place that snubs grace.

Grace is something given to us beyond our comprehension, beyond our estimated worth or abilities. It makes it OK for me to live, as I am, gaining light about what I am and ought to be.

God wants us to know that change above and beyond anything else - that's why He became one of us - to say that right here, right now, life can be so much more than we ever imagined.

Grace is always there, even when we think we've moved way beyond its orbit - it's amazing how it can bring recovery.

Every day of your life may bring changes, large and small, but there's one key thing each of us need all the time.

Time to take a look at the world of Grace.