For the past seven months I have agonized at times at how to accurately share the good news with my friends since returning to faith in God’s incredible grace and reach for us through the cross. I have struggled in part, because I have been so overwhelmed by the incredible sense of God’s love. A love that cost Him dearly to express, the price of Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross for the sin of the world. A free gift that was costly to the Giver, and from my own experience, largely misunderstood and unappreciated by those it was meant for.
This amazing knowledge, which has started to become my most important treasure, I have been eager to share. Not out of religious duty, but from an overwhelming sense of how truly amazing grace is. And not just for those “wretched” sinners out there, but to all the people I know who need to be embraced by grace, myself first among them.
Yet after every encounter with this grace I find myself feeling more and more inadequate to the task, there is simply no way I can share this faith and have it be understood or appreciated and accepted. I know this because after 10+ years in religious circles, it took being on the brink of losing everything I had to realize God’s grace was always there and available to me.
And so I kept on in silence, overwhelmed by this amazing burden.
And then Solomon dedicated the Temple.
It was a text in church, recently one Sunday evening. Solomon, kneeling down, after completing years of work on the Temple in Jerusalem, hands raised and he asks aloud,
But will God indeed dwell with mankind on the earth?
Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain You; how much less this house which I have built.
I realized that I thought my problem was new, that somehow, I alone had been the first to be overwhelmed by the knowledge of God’s great love and my inability to express it to others.
King Solomon had pondered the question. Could God be contained in a temple made with the hands of humans? The very heavens couldn’t contain Him, would he be able to dwell among men in a building, however grand?
26 letters, thousands of words, yet it was hopeless to expect that my words could ever do this love, this grace, justice, by my frail attempts to contain it in words alone.
In the winter I took apart an old typewriter, for the keys, the letters and gears and springs that have all made their way into pieces of art I have made. But I kept the typewriter shell; my wife suggested it may be useful in some way later on.
As I was up one night musing on God’s grace and my inability, I realized that useless typewriter was a perfect metaphor for my own inability to communicate through words the greatness of God’s reach for us, and if a message came from it, that would be a miracle.
But recently as I have felt compelled to live this grace out more fully, I have been startled that I am in fact a letter, written by God to all who I come in contact with, and my words are nearly silent in comparison to the deeds seen by all. And so I am more dependent for grace than before and more inadequate to the task than ever.
But God has contented Himself to dwell in a temple not made with human hands and so it goes…
words fail, but love never fails.
