Finding Grace by Donna VanLiere

Background, author is molested twice as a child, both times feeling as if God abandoned her. She felt it was her fault and her self worth plummeted. Years later, she is unfulfilled in her job and is unable to become pregnant.

The book cover reads, "Finding Grace is a book for anyone who has struggled to understand why our desires - even the simplest ones - are sometimes denied. It is a book for anyone who has questioned where God is when we need Him most."

I dog-eared my favorite pages, which was pretty much every other page. This book was rich with quotes and thoughts that stretched my brain. I could hardly set it down. All of the following are passages copied straight from the book, Finding Grace.

Chapter Two

Maya Angelou was asked what she considered the most profound evil in society and she said sexual abuse against a child because one sexual act takes that child from the innocence of knowing nothing, to the cynicism of believing nothing.

The Hobbit - "There is more to you than you know."

The author of Ecclesisastes says God has set eternity in our hearts. Our lineage is both human and divine, making us not the presumed earthlings on a spiritual jaunt but rather spiritual beings on a human journey.

If our soul is never nourished, if it is kept tucked away from its eternal purpose then it will seek nourishment somewhere else as we pour ourselves into things like career, learning, organizations, governing bodies, drugs or sex, in an effort to fill the heavenly sized gap.

Augustine said God gives where He finds empty hands. My hands were full of plans and dreams that I had determined to make happen. I had no need for God or His help so I had no need for grace.

Funny how people color the way we feel about ourselves. Somewhere along the way, sociologists termed that as the looking-glass self: We begin to perceive ourselves as those around us see us.

Chapter Three

"...the voice we should listen to most as we choose a vocation is the voice that we might think we should listen to least, and that is the voice of our own gladness. What can we do that makes us the gladdest...? Is it making things with our hands out of wood, or stone or paper or canvas? Or is it making something we hope like truth out of words? Or is it making people laugh or weep in a way that cleanses their spirit? I believe that if it is a thing that makes us truly glad, then it is a God thing and it is our thing and it is the calling voice that we were made to answer with our lives." Frederick Buechner, Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons

Like all the superspiritual, The Boyfriend's parents were so supersized in their spirituality that they had no need for grace. They had forgotten that it was the lop-sided souls, the prostitutes, the divocees, and the terminal who followed Christ while He was on earth. It was never the religious scholars. They had so much head knowledge that they didn't need the gifts of grace walking amongst them in Palestine. The superspiritual, like the superintellectual, are rigid and unapproachable. Through the life of Christ I see that honest, true and pure spirituality is completely accessible and grace-filled.

Chapter Four

The deepest questions I asked at that time were, "How much does it pay?" Or, "How much time off for vacation?" I never asked my life the deep and abiding questions about purpose, meaning or value or what if I gained the whole world and lost my soul.

A.W. Tozer said the most important question we will ever ask ourselves is, "What do I really think about God?"

My life was begging me to ask the important questions, but I lived without giving an ear to the Divine Whisper in my soul; threatening to become deaf to the loudest shouts of direction.

Chapter Five

In the desert we look back on former days and even if they stunk we think, "I was happy then." We assume that if we have a "dignified" job, obey the law, stay out of jail and pay our taxes on time, that we're entitled to some small corner of happiness. We believe that if we're kind to clerks and waitreses, throw a few dollars to the homeless, and back a worthy cause that God, like some mystical, omniscient Santa, will keep the presents coming. But one day the presents stop coming and happiness as we have defined it is a faded recollection. People who don't belive in God expect nothing of Him so are presumably never upset or disappointed with Him but for those of us who see His hand on this world in the oceans and stars and in the faces of our neighbors, we expects something, anything, that whispers to us that there is some sort of road map for our life.

Chapter Six

Poet William Blake said if God is anything He is understanding. God cared and tried time and again to show the Israelites that. He freed them from slavery, promised them a land of their own, even fed and clothed them, but they found fault with Him at every bump along the trip. What's interesting is that God never strong-armed them into submission. He didn't paralyze them when they built a golden calf to worship, or send them packing back to slavery in Egypt when they had the audacity to say they'd be better off there, or close the breadline when they complained about eating manna "again," but instead allowed them to grumble and carp and rail against Him. I thought it was interesting that from the beginning of time and through centuries of man's inhumanity to man, God had never subjected us to His all-consuming power. With one tip of the earht's axis we could be obligerated in an instant. He had instead chosen the painstaking way of love, breaking through the chinks of our heart with small taps of grace. At some point I realized the Israelites had turned away, not God. For years, He had held out His hand to them saying, "Here, here, here," but it was impossible to receive a gift when their backs were turned to the giver.

I had been wrestling with God for years in my own way. I found a pen, writing the words, "Bless me," in the margin next to Jacob's story. In the end, our eyes may not see it, our ears may not hear it, or our hands may not touch it, but it's what our souls want and cry out for in the darkness. Bless me! Not because of who I am or what I have or haven't done but because of who You are!

Days later, I was reading Isaiah again, this time chapter 43. "Forger the former things, " God says, "Do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the desert and streams in the wasteland." In chapter 46, I read, "I have made you and I will carry you; I will sustain you and I will rescue you."

Chapter Seven

In Psalm 33:11, I read that, "The plans of the Lord stand firm forever." In Isaiah chapter 46, I read, "What I have planned, that will I do." It occured to me that we are constantly running, morphing, flailing, spinning and changing but God's plan for us stays the same. We believe the divorce, the affair, the accident, the disgrace or the failing will disqualify us. "Whatever you planned for my life isn't going to work and I need a new plan." But a new plan is contrary to God's nature. There has never been a Plan B.

I believe that inside all of us we want to believe that we're here for some higher purpose than to just pay our bills before the undertaker collects his check but there's a stopgap somewhere - Is it in the soul? Our spirit? The heart? - that hinders our discovery, leaving us with an inexpressible feeling that something is missing. All we know is that something is not right beneathe our skin. Cound that inner "whatever" be the voice of Providence inviting us to know Him? The emptiness says: Come to me. I'll never betray you. I know you by name. I know the plans I have for you.
Lazarus - When mourners inside the home heard that Jesus was coming, Mary stayed put, settled in her grief, but Martha ran out to meet Him. She pointed out the obvious and said, "If you had been here my brother would not have died." Then she said, "But." "But I know that even now God will give you whatever you ask," Martha said.

There's Martha - eyes swollen, heart fractgured and wailing echoes from her home, yet she still believes there's more to her circumstances than just grief. We stand alongside her in our own way - the limping throng who have been beaten down, wearied by trials, bruised from the past, and flogged by circumstances but in the end we cling to the smallest shred of faith. I know I lost my job but...I know he left me for another woman but...I know my son is on the streets but...I know my spouse is dead but...I - still - believe.

Broken dreams are the launch pad to growth. The person who emerges from the pain is either stronger for it or strangled by it. The problem with unfulfilled dreams is that they give us tunnel vision; we focus on ourselves, and that can be a depressing and discouraging place to look. Self-absorption is abusive, unforgiving, critical, intoerlable, disappointed, angry, shameful and always impatient.

What is ironic that God calls us to examine ourselves only two times in the Bible (in I Corinthians 11:28, it says we should examine ourselves before taking communion and in II Corinthians 13:5, we are asked to examine whether we are in the faith, not just drifting along and sampling the new thing on the market but genuinely grounded in the truth of God's Son). Neither of these instances has anything to do with our looks, job, status, power or family but we continue to spin our wheels and to juggle plates in an effort to whittle down our life to something we can manage.

When we admit our helplessness in driving our own dream and acknowledge God's divine power and goodness, we open the door to grace. Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., said, "The great act of faith is when man decides that he is not God."

Chapter Eight

Book of John - man born blind. One day Christ saw him and restored the man's sight. The religious leaders were outraged, saying Christ couldn't be from God because He worked on the Sabbath. The religious leaders sent for the man's parents and asked if he was really their son and sent for the man formerly known as Blind Guy again. The religious leaders began to hurl insults at him. Not sharing in Blind Guys' happiness over his new sight, they threw him out of their presence.

The text says that Christ heard about what happened and found the man, which implies that He went out looking for him.

Augustine, the fourth-century Latin philosopher and scholar, spent much of his life studying the world's philosophies and said that in them he discovered that man is looking for God. When he was in his thirties, Augustine opened the Gospel of John and his life was transformed when he read verse fourteen of chapter one: The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us. We have see His glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. "In John 1:14," Augustine said, "I find that God is looking for man!"

Chapter Nine

Our culture views pain a something that should at least be minimized if not obliterated altogether. We admit we feel bad but we want instant elimination of any traces of suffering. We tend to live in a happiness-centered society and if we're not truly happy then something must be terribly wrong. We like to reduce life down to something we can manage and feel God should not only defer to our plan but fully cooperate with it. But when He doesn't and our plan goes awry, we're insistent that someone or something erase our heartache immediately. We arrange our lives to alleviate disappointment, frustration, dissatisfaction, and pain, viewing them as enemies of our soul. But are they always bad? Can't disappointment and broken dreams actually be good if we listen to what our life is saying through them? If we allow them, if we can stand the pull, broken dreams can lead to higher dreams.

Why forgive? I forgive you not because you've asked for it or would even care but because I don't want to be in bondage to you. God won't fix the past but if we're willing, He can release us from it.

Truth is, we don't like pain or grief or suffering of any kind. Humans prefer to avoid it altogether but God uses it for good. No pain, no growth. No suffering, no empathy. No grief, no compassion.

"Oh!" Marin Luther said. "His grace and goodness towards us is so immeasurably great, that without great assaults and trials it cannot be understood."

When we read the words of Jesus to a lame man, "Do you want to be well?" our broken hearts and crippled spirits cry, "Yes! Yes! Yes!" We know that we have lived and will continue to live a flawed and imperfect life but we also understand that the light of God can only get in through our cracks. This wisdom awakens in our soul the realization that there is a Divine plan for us. There is a Divine plan for us. There is a Divine plan for us. There is a Divine plan for us. We are the cause of His journey. We are the cause of His journey. We are the cause of His journey.

That knowledge buckles our knees and we tremble before God, asking, "Why me? Why choose or love me?" Life words finally move from our head to our heart and we embrace the fact that we are not only loved and accepted but pursued by God.

Chapter Ten

"No one can understand how special adoption is until they do it themselves," said Linda Prater, a longime friend. "She looked right at me and I just knew she was mine. There was no doubt about it. And you'll know it, too." She (Gracie) wasn't born through my body but in my heart - where grace is always birthed.

Shadowlands is the 1993 film that depicts the life of C.S. Lewis and his first and only marriage to Joy Davidman that took place when he was nearing sixty and Joy was battling cancer. She died four years after they married and Lewis's grief was profound. Actor Anthony Hopkins, portraying Lewis, says, "Why love if losing hurts so much? I have no answers, only the life I have lived. Twice in that life I was given the choice, as a boy and as a man. The boy chose safety. The man chose suffering. The pain now is part of the happiness then. " We can try to cover the pain, but in the end it's inevitable. It's part of the deal. We can't have one without the other.

Chapter Eleven

God sees our downcast eyes and hobbled spirits, and as we turn our faces to Him, before a word stumbles past our lips, He says, "I forgive you." But this incomprehensible forgiveness doesn't allow for what German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who lost his life to the Nazis in 1945, called "cheap grace" (careless attitude that thumbs our noses at what was given for us, prompting us to live only for ourselves). Cheap grace diminishes the power of the gift. Grace came to earth and walked among us for thirty-three years before the Romans killed Him on a hill called Golgotha. There is no grace without Golgotha.

British author Dorothy Sayers said, "God entrusted His reputation to ordinary people." So often our view of God is limited to these ordinary, flesh-and-blood creatures who are poor dispensers of grace. But, the qustion shouldn't necessarily be why believe in God but most important, "What do I really think about God?"

Parents should talk to their children about appropriate behavior from adults and other children. Gracie brought home a leaflet. It featured children in different "safe" and "unsafe" touching situations: a child holding hands with her friend or getting a hug from Grandma were two examples of safe touching. A child being pushed on the playground or avoiding a man hiding behind a tree were two examples of unsafe touching. On one page it said if someone asks to see your private parts, which are the parts covered by a swimsuit, a child should say, "No! No! No! No! No! No!" If someone asks to touch your private parts or wants you to touch him or her on their private parts and says the touches are secret, the child should say, "No! I don't like those secrets!" "If anyone makes you feel strange or uncomfortable, run and tell and adult you can trust. If you have to, keep telling people until someone believes you."

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