a friend recently mentioned her fall from grace at a local church. it was a small comment in the midst of a much larger story but i can’t seem to shake the theological absurdity and it’s been bouncing around my brain ever since.
a fall from grace? but isn’t the fall the very beginning of grace?
her issue is almost irrelevant. it is enough to know that whether addiction or affair, she fell. she lost her church, her home, and her community. her choices left her husband without a job and they are now a thousand miles from family, trying to create anew. new trust. a new home. new normal.
she isn’t so different than me. and it isn’t the inconceivable nature of her sin that repulses me - that tempts me to judge or condemn or distance myself. when i’m just brave enough to be honest, i can admit that it is the familiarity of her choices that i hate. her sin is so ugly because in her faults i see my own. her shattered life reflects too clearly my own frailty.
is that why i am so quick to withhold grace? why the Church is known for judgment instead of redemption? is it my selfish doubt that fears that her sins might use up the grace i know i need?
it was the reactions of her church that caused her to name that season a fall from grace. the reactions of a community bound by little more than the communal recognition of their own depravity and an admitted need for unwarranted redemption.
the Church functions as a recognition of our desperate dependence on grace. we are called to be a people who acknowledge that we have lost all but grace. and so even in the depths of dark, detestable, ugly sin there can be no fall from grace.
only a fall into grace.
