I can’t eat Mexican food. Well, I can–but I’m not much fun to be around later. If you catch my drift.
Really, it’s the frijoles (beans) that don’t agree with me (my wife says I’m allergic). I suspect I’m not alone in this.
Thus, there’s a saying you may have heard: Mexican food is the gift that keeps on giving.
And giving.
As true as this is, eventually it passes.
There is a real gift that keeps on giving–no matter how badly we stink it up, and that’s God’s grace. Try as we might, we can’t “out-sin” it. God waits, like the father of the Prodigal son, scanning the horizon for his beloved.
He waits, when we stink it up, for us to fall (in the words of the late Rich Mullins) “on the grace that first brought me to you.”
Grace then, like Mexican food, is a gift that keeps on giving. Unlike, it doesn’t lead to noxious emissions; rather, it eradicates them.
Grace: we need it. We need to give it, we need to receive it. We need to live and breathe it.
Grace: freely you have received, now freely give.
Grace: is there truly anything else like it?