Coping with grace | Previous Challenge Entry

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TITLE: Coping with grace | Previous Challenge Entry
By Steve Thomas
04/24/16
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Coping with grace. A mother’s story

I turned on my pocket recorder. My smile said I’ll ask you questions, but I already know the answers. In fact, we can do this without any input from you. . Ii knew the answers, just follow me.
How did you wind up homeless? I was doing some interviews focused on the homeless. How did they arrive there? What is /was their plan to get out of there? As she started to tell her story, the words, her words, were powerful. With every word she spoke, the color seemed to come out of her face, like a sink that was full of water, but finally beginning to drain.
She went on to say: everyone has in mind what happens when a person or family suddenly finds itself unemployed, homeless, or both. The first answer or theory is always drugs. The struggling family must have lost their job because of laziness or smoked, snorted, and injected their livelihood away . But this is not the case. My company downsized, and I was a part of that downsizing. No job, no money. No money no ability to pay bills. When the bills are not paid. Repossession and eviction become reality. If you have no home, then you have no address to put on a job application. And if you cannot fill out an application, then you will not get a job. Tape recorder off!
I wasn’t some marginal, borderline employee. I was great and then some. My boss used to say that I had “a ton of runway left.” He said that I had yet to reach my peak as an employee. I was a rising star both on earth and in heaven. I had favor. I had talent. I had faith; but I had no job. I began to wonder if I had hit my peak as a Christian.
Is there really an answer to this question? We are all a routine checkup away from bad news and a bad financial quarter away from the unemployment line. We all believe that things are going well with us because of something that we have done. We typically believe that we are somehow caught up in the struggles of life because we haven’t been living right.
And what do you tell a mother or a family when dark clouds seemingly settle over their homes and hearts for what seems like an eternity? As we grow as Christians, do things become more difficult and challenging? And aren’t the streets and homelessness havens for those that chose to not to obeying God?
God’s proclamation to Paul that His grace is sufficient was not a promise of good news , it was words of comfort that would be needed more and more as the sufficiency of grace overtakes the satisfaction that comes from healing.

I’m not sure how the mother’s story ended. My hope is that a door would haze opened for her, and life turned itself around .I also know that it’s difficult to be used by God. But more importantly, we should not pretend that it will feel good or downplay the current storm. So the next time you are at a traffic light and someone taps on your window with a message of hope written on cardboard, don’t lock your car door, open your heart.

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