Rain, reign, rein

God walked on the unruly waters, and they cowered before him. On rain-slick streets I walk on water tamed, my steps displacing a film of wet still possessing just enough surface-tension to hold my footprints for a moment in my wake. To hallow, and to hound, my passing-by: “Here walks one of the human-kind, creatures with God-given authority to rule over the earth; will this one exercise their rule for good or ill, or abdicate all responsibility?”

You only notice, if at all, after the rain.

Grace, part 2

Every so often, the pavement is also stained by dark red berries. This, too, is grace. Fallen on concrete, they will never seed the next generation. Crushed, twice daily, under the feet of oblivious schoolgirls, they do not even serve for food for birds. These fruit are fruitless — except, their blood cries from the ground, “there is more than enough, abundantly more-than!”

Grace insists that there is always some part of our lives that is not productive, that serves no other economy, except that of grace. Call it a tithe, if you will; though it is a tithe we receive, not offer up. I bristle at the very thought that grace should insist on anything. It sounds so lacking in grace, the ego, wriggling, insists. But grace is all-or-nothing. You cannot have ‘some grace’. And so, I fall from grace, again and again; only to be graciously lifted up once more. Only to discover that grace does not only give me its tithe, it gives me all I have.

This is what the seeds scattered on the pavement tell me. Oh, my ears!

Grace, part 1

I leave the house for the first time in two days. Walking along the street, my eyes are drawn to every green tendril and tiny, perfect leaf that has pushed its way up through cracks in the concrete slabs — stained by the foulings of every neighbourhood dog; scarred by the memory of countless spat-out wads of gum; scattered with cubes of glass from a smashed-in car window, the car itself long since moved on...

Life, against all the odds. This is grace.