God's liberating touch....

Over the years thre women spent much time with our family to help us care for our children. They shared intimate moments with us: they listened to us talking about normal things, but also about dificult topics. They saw us as no one else - how we lived in our home, how and with what we dressed, how we set up and lived in our rooms, they knew what kept us busy, who visited us, what we bought, how the kids went to school, to university, how they got married - all those special events in the life of a family. They shared our joys, the special moments, but they also experienced our losses, the deaths of our dearest ones.

Celia was the last one of the three to help us in our home. She was a big woman. She could not always keep up the pace - which we understood and accepted. But she was someone with a big heart. She was reliable, friendly, quiet, a reassuring presence to all of us.

At the same time, like many of her peers in apartheid South Africa, she was a strong woman, who raised her kids on a limited salary to study at a university.

But not everything was always sunshine and roses. For some reason or other, Celia managed to break some of our more precious items while she did the washing up. We did not believe in buying extravagantly, but we had collected a few special items – among which a beautiful, almost irreplaceable set of crockery. Over a number of months, Celia regularly came to us with a broken piece from this set and told us that she had broken it.

We never really said anything about her accidents. In our family we accepted that such things happen. We also never really wondered what she thought about it, it was of such little consequence to us.

When we finally moved to another city and had to say goodbye to her, she thanked us, in her quiet, almost graceful manner. And then she made a remark which I never forgot. She explicitly mentioned how grateful she was that we never shouted at her – not even, she added, when she broke our precious crockety pieces.

For some reason or other, I cannot forget her words. They remain with me because they reveal to me how sensitive she was about her accidents. And, as time goes by, I understand more and more why she came to us with the pieces in her hand, each time, to tell us what happened and to inform us quite openly and honestly that she was the responsible person. It was for her, from her background, difficult to experience that she caused us to lose what were special items in our household.

Recently, as I reflected on her remarks again, I wondered if her words of farewell do not help me to understand God’s grace better. We often are guilty of breaking the most beautiful of beautiful things in our life. We fear God’s response - God's demand that we should compensate, or God's anger at our failures. Only to discover that God is a forgiving God, a loving God who understands perhaps better than we do ourselves, how much pain we already experience in our failures. Sin is so humiliating because it makes us realize how frail, how vulnerable we are, how we destroy precious things.

But God’s grace time and again sets us free from the pain that we cause – mostly and especially to ourselves.

How wonderful and liberating is it to experience that God does not blame us. If only we stand before God, coram Deo, with the broken pieces of our lives! Our standing before God is ausserdem an indication of our realisiation that we are innerly broken as well. We are pained by the thougth that we have brought shamwe over ourselves....

God does not reciprocate, does not make us pay. God, seeing us in our shame, liberates us to become as full of grace as Godself is. It is then, as we continue to experience the unfathomable and inexhaustible grace of god, that we begin to live so deeply in God’s grace, that grace flows out of us to others. We can share grace, give it freely to others, as if it is a matter of course.

We can live like this because we recognise in the other who harm us, our own image: fallible, yet desperately in need of forgiveness and understanding. And as we see the inner brokenness of the others, our gift of grace and forgiveness becomes an instrument of healing.

God liberating touch never ends in us. It flows through us to humanity...