Homes Updates: Anatomy of a Gallery Wall

I am not really a home blogger. But I am a bona fide home hacker and I do love to be inspired by the beauty of my surroundings. And I just happen to have a blog which means that sometimes I see fit to interrupt my irregularly scheduled posts about kids and failure and making friends with mess to show you my most recent home hacks.

Enter this post on "gallery walls."

Oh how I love me some gallery walls. I always have. My first gallery wall was way back in 2002. I'd traveled abroad by then and I desperately wanted to display my photos and art from my travels. When we moved into our current home 7 1/2 years ago, I replicated much of what was in our old house and for the most part, it has remained unchanged since then. 

I may be a compulsive rearranger but when I get my walls a certain way and love it, I do not change a thing.

But new paint inspired some much-needed change. {See the earlier post this week on new paint and our dresser-turned-entertainment-center.} I painted all the shelves and some of my frames white. I mixed in new photos and art. And it just. kept. growing. My gallery wall is now so expansive that I'm thinking about charging admission.

Here's the great room gallery wall BEFORE:

{Oh and here it is after I had to move the settee to make room for our homeschool desks a few years ago. We needed more seating in the living room and a place other than the kitchen table to do school. Function over form my friends.}

And here's the great room galley wall AFTER:

I know, that's a lot of stuff on the wall. Maybe too much. But it makes me smile and it's terribly sentimental and I really, really love it. 

{Now that I'm no longer homeschooling, that long desk had become a landing strip for clutter and laundry so I removed half of her. I'll show you where the other half went in another post.}

So this post is all about what I've learned after assembling a few gallery walls over the years. I know, a "bullet point post" sort of flies in the face of what I'm all about; nonetheless, I'll share with you some tips that may be useful if you want to create a gallery wall of your own. I'm anything but an expert. Take or leave whatever you like.

1. Make it personal. There's nothing wrong with buying cute, mass-produced art from Hobby Lobby. Truly there's not. I've gotten a few things like that over the years but recently realized that I've given all of it away or sold it in yard sales. In the end, I guess I prefer what's "real" or sentimental or crafted by an actual artist, even if that artist is my amateur kid painter. 

I have four pieces of kid art on this wall. And I'm just crazy about all of them. 

Two pieces of art are watercolors by street artists in Prague, given to me by my sister who visited there during the year she lived in Munich. They are beautiful, miniature works of art and I have always adored watercolors. I've had these for years and love them just as much as I always have. 

I have three "artifacts" that are super special. One of them is a teapot that belonged to my husband's grandmother, gifted to me by his grandfather. Both of them are in Heaven now and gifts like the teapot are sweet reminders of them. 

Another is a gorgeous Anthropologie teapot gifted to me by Lily for my birthday a few years ago. The last is a hanging piece of pottery crafted by a local South Carolina artisan and given to me by my dear sister last year. 

I also copied, pasted, and printed out this "Prayer for the Home" that I saw on Edie's blog, Life in Grace, a really long time ago. It's so beautiful. 

I thought it was perfect and wanted to have it in our place too. I wrapped some scrapbook paper around a matte and put it in a clear frame. 

2. Choose your favorite photos. I have ten photos on this wall. That's quite a lot but they're a sweet, eclectic representation of our family. Having fewer but larger photos would also work beautifully. I'd love to have a few larger canvas pieces around the house at some point but with an open floor plan, there's a shortage of walls and therefore a shortage of gallery space. 

Photos are such an easy, inexpensive way to change things up. Take 20 minutes to upload and print several of your favorite photos that are sitting in obscurity on your hard-drive. Then grab some cheap, chunky frames from a discount store {or from your attic} and you're good to go. 

I don't know why I put simple things off like that. I'm always amazed at how easy and quick it is to add photo updates to our space; I always wish I'd done it sooner. 

3. Mix art and photos and "artifacts." It just works. Too many like things can feel matchy-matchy. Mixing is up is fun and interesting. That's all there is too it. 

4. Add architectural elements. Shelves and cubes and giant chunky frames add substance and dimension. 

5. Group tiny things inside larger frames or on shelves. Scale is important. Our house is small but this room is huge. It comprises two-thirds of our house. Small picture frames and tchotchkes sitting on end tables or tacked to the wall with nothing around them end up adding to the clutter and getting swallowed up by the space. But let's face it, we have beautiful things we want to display that are smaller than an 11 x 14 frame.  

For this wall, I found that grouping my smaller frames inside one giant frame feels cohesive instead of cluttered. 

6. Crop. This is something I've just discovered. My daughter has gobs of art and because she's a perfectionist, she hates most of it. Thankfully, I have salvaged some precious pieces from the trash. This monarch butterfly, one of her "earlier works," was painted on a much larger piece of paper. I cut out just the butterfly and framed it. Made all the difference. 

This waterlily painting was a half-hearted attempt at Monet. It was her first draft and she tried to trash it. The paint ran and the colors mixed too much and she thought it was a wreck. But I thought the colors were beautiful and I told her it was simply an impressionist version of impressionism. Once again, I cut out a small piece of it and showcased it in a thrift-store frame. She still doesn't love it...but I do. 

7. Copy. Inspiration is everywhere. Grab your old magazines, get on Pinterest, do a search for "gallery walls." See something in a friend's home a snap a picture. You don't have to replicate it identically but you can use similar sizes, shapes, combinations, layouts and colors. 

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Here's a great post on artwork wall groupings that is full of all sorts of beautiful and vastly different gallery walls. 

There is no need to reinvent the wheel, people. Remember, you don't have to be inventive to still be creative. 

Find something you like and make it your own. You'll feel like a creative genius when you're done. 

Years ago I had a friend who took a picture of my wall and replicated it with her own pieces at home. It totally worked and she loved it. 

8. Don't over-think it. Just experiment. 

The "bones" of this wall {the shelves, some of the larger pieces} stayed the same. I held stuff up and moved things around and put countless tiny nail holes in my wall. 

My friend walked down to look at and said, "I love it. It's balanced even though it's not symmetrical. And it's interesting. There's so much you want to look at." That was good enough for me. This same friend is doing a gallery wall of her own. She cut out paper shapes of frames and such and tacked them to the wall. She's moved them around and played with the design until she finds what she likes. That works too and is probably the "right" way of doing a project like this.

Unfortunately I am ten shades of impatient and tend to just use what I have, eyeball things, and grab the hammer. 

9. Pick one to three frame finishes and stick with those. This isn't a "rule." There are no rules. {This is why I love people like The Nester and Edie.} 

Actually I've seen gallery walls with all sorts of different frames and finishes and it works. But because I'm an amateur, I've found that sticking with one to three of the same color frames brings it together a bit. In my case, I used black, white, and a bit of faded, splotchy gold. 

Here's my other, smaller gallery wall as you leave the living room and walk down the hallway. Everything is white. I love this too and if you want a less eclectic, more traditional look, go with all the same finish on your shelves and frames. 

{Here's that same wall with the old wall color and black frames. Ugh. Why do wall colors photograph so strangely?}

10. Enlist help. I know what some of you are thinking: "I'm just no good at this sort of thing. I simply can't do this." In the words of Tim Gunn, you feel like you just can't "make it work."

I hear you. And let's face it, some people just see the world through a more creative, free-spirited lens. They can put things together in ways others would never imagine. Chances are you have one of those friends. Ask him or her to help you. 

I'm no professional but I love beauty and home. My family says I've always been a tad on the resourceful side and I do so love to lend a hand and help a friend make her space beautiful too. And I've been known to enlist my own artistic friends when I feel stuck. 

Tell your creative friend that you'll watch her kids or buy her a frappuccino while she hacks up your wall. Win, win. 

And just to keep it real. Here is how the gallery wall has evolved just while I've been sitting her typing out this post.

Apparently I have a tiny creative genius of my own, which brings me to tip number....

11. A fort is the perfect addition to any space. 

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So there you have it. What do you think, are you a fan of the gallery wall trend? Any tips of the trade you can share with the rest of us?

Home Updates: Dresser Turned Entertainment Center

We've made a few changes around here these last couple of months. I'm not going to show you all at once. {Because that would require getting too much of my house picked up at the same time.}

My husband's parents visited over Spring Break and because I was sick and my son got the flu, our local sightseeing plans were cancelled. Instead, they painted my foyer and great room, which includes the kitchen. I'm still giddy about it. 

{The color: Comfort Gray by Sherwin Williams. I had Lowe's color-match it.}

Fresh color on the walls ushered in some other fresh updates. My favorite is a "new" piece of furniture for our TV. 

We've lived in this house 7 1/2 years and the TV wall has gone from this (Pier One pine armoire):

To this (our bookshelf / nightstands on loan until we could find something else): 

To this (IKEA Expedit unit that I thought was right but ended up being all wrong):

To this (a repurposed white dresser that gave me a less obtrusive look but that I couldn't quite get right): 

And finally, to this. Tada! 

Talk about the evolution of a space! Sometimes you have to find out what you don't like in order to figure out what you do. The Pier One armoire was fine but didn't fit our new TV. I sold it on Craigslist and used our nightstands in the meantime to hold the TV. The giant IKEA unit looked much smaller in the store than it did in our living room. {Let's face it, when a store is the size of a small country, everything looks smaller than it really is.} I sold it to my neighbor and had been patiently waiting for a replacement ever since. 

A friend of mine gave me an old dresser that I repainted but despite ridiculous amounts of sanding, I couldn't get some of the bubbled wood sanded flat. I experimented with a number of failed drawer coverings. Burlap, painted burlap, modge-podged patterned papers....all of them epic DIY fails.

{Exhibit A: #modgepodgeisthedevil}

Finally I moved the solid but bubbled dresser to my boys' closet {as they were in desperate need of some storage} because at long last I found the perfect piece at a local consignment store. 

Love at first sight. {She looked less orange in real life.} Here she is in the store:

Drexel, 1974. Great condition. Perfect storage. Fairly priced. 

I actually wasn't going to paint her but my husband, who rarely has an opinion about home stuff, looked at it in the back of my van and said, "Oh. You're going to paint it aren't you?" 

Obviously, I had to paint her. And you know what? I'm so glad I did. White may be "boring" and what I always end up painting my stuff but maybe that's because it's fresh and looks good with everything. Plus, the bronzey bling on the drawers and corners makes her glam instead of "meh."

DVDs, games, and controllers are neatly tucked away in the drawers and this middle cabinet is the perfect size for the PS3. 

Also? My boys figured out that they can apparently still work the PS3 via remote with the middle door closed, causing an extreme amount of heat to build up inside. Good thing my husband realized what they were up to or this post would have been titled, "How a DIY Project Burned Down My House."

After I finished this project and felt oh so happy about things, I discovered this little gem in my home ideas notebook. It's a binder I've had for years and even with the advent of Pinterest, I still rip pages out of magazines and file them away. A year ago I filed this page but had forgotten about it:

Crazy! The wall color is almost the same as mine and the style of that dresser is eerily similar as well. I have a shiny turquoise lamp in my living room and my favorite accent color is that bright yellow. It was fun {and reassuring} to see that this piece I'd been waiting for was meant to be, a true fit for my style, form and function.

Now, if only I had the talent and motivation to hack that gorgeous painting...

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Up next...gallery wall re-dos. 

The Upside of Failure

Success is never final; failure is never fatal. It is courage that counts.

                                     ~Winston Churchill

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Isn't it funny how we desperately avoid that which makes us real and touchable and recklessly open to grace? The older I get, the less I'm captivated by great and righteous people and the more I'm drawn to the ones who don't get it right but keep going anyway. Brokenness can be the loveliest thing. 

It's a human thing to avoid failure. No one aspires to loser-dom. We don't begin each day hoping we'll careen into a ditch or get fired or flunk a final exam or spew careless words that hurt those we love the most. Nor should we. 

But for most of us, the prospect or the painful reality of failure, of not meeting our own expectations, of not meeting others' expectations, of falling short in some miniscule or monumental way--it's not something we cope with all that well. 

We all approach failure differently, depending on our personalities and experiences. Some refuse to even try, paralyzed by the sheer possibility of falling short. Others try harder and harder, convinced that if they simply amp up the effort, they'll yield perfection. Some float into escapism in ways that bring temporary relief but long-term grief. 

And then there are those who, when whipped by failure, simply take hold of the whip for themselves and begin the punitive penance of self-flagellation. Mental anguish and condemning thoughts have their way and the shame spiral often turns into a vicious cycle of renewed effort followed by familiar defeat. 

For years I've known about Grace. I sang its songs and could spout its doctrine. But I did not run headlong into Grace when I felt wrecked by my own failure. Instead, I'd pick up the whip. I'd try harder. I'd give up altogether. {I gave equal opportunity to my coping mechanisms.} 

Grace was an abstraction.

And it still would be, if not for failure. I've failed in so many ways where I thought I wouldn't, found I'm simply not inherently capable in endeavors that have felt hugely important. I have sins and pitfalls that will not die, struggles that lie dormant for many seasons and then rear their ugly heads when I least expect it.

Life would be simpler if we only had our own failures to contend with. But because we live in relationship with others, we do battle with their failures too. Loved ones who owe us their fidelity and provision and protection sometimes fall short. Children and spouses, parents and siblings, friends and colleagues--they're prone to disappoint us, to anger us, to follow their own selfish paths and leave us in the wake. 

There are rules in relationships and sometimes the rules get broken. What then? 

Well, that's probably best saved for a different post so let me just get back what the good Mr. Churchill said about failure, that it's not fatal. {And believe it or not, that can apply to our relationships too.}

He's not the first to speak such counter-cultural "nonsense." I've heard and read Bible stories my entire life but lately I've been nearly dumbstruck by the sheer loser-ness of those who Jesus chose to use. I'm seeing their frailty with new eyes and it's kind of amazing. 

What about Peter for example, the disciple who triple denied Jesus? 

In the Ragamuffin Gospel, Brennan Manning asks: 

What future would have awaited Peter if he had had to depend on my patience, understanding, and compassion? Instead of a shrug, sneer, slap, or curse, Jesus responded with the subtlest and most gracious compliment imaginable. He named Peter the leader of the faith community and entrusted him with the authority to preach the Good News in the power of the Spirit. 

We forget that Jesus told Peter he was the one on whom He'd build his church. And Jesus told him this before his shameful string of denials. Do you get that? Jesus granted Peter "greatness" knowing that he would soon demonstrate tremendous betrayal. He knew who Peter was, knew his capacity for self-interest and its resulting failure. But He loved him anyway. He'd called him long before. 

Peter got scared. He acted impulsively. He screwed up and immediately regretted it. We are not so different and those we love are not so different either. 

So what would happen if we began to embrace failure with openness and gratitude? Yes, there are difficult and beautiful lessons learned in the trenches but more importantly, it's our brokenness, our inability, our failure, our imperfection, that leads us to grace and that draws others into that same saving, life-giving grace. 

I daresay that Peter's ministry had more currency and conviction because he knew what he was talking about. He'd experienced the lavish, undeserved, unconditional love of Christ for himself and it changed him. 

Failure can give way to freedom. It doesn't make sense but it's true. 

Let us not forget that it was the prodigal son who experienced the lavish love and elaborate feast. Meanwhile the law-abiding older brother refused the goodness and merriment surrounding the sinner who stumbled home and into the arms of the faithful, forgiving father. 

The failing prodigal found freedom. The self-righteous rule-follower remained enslaved. 

So what would have happened if Peter had stayed down, if he'd been so gripped by his stupid failure that he refused to ever try again, if he'd succumbed to voices of condemnation and a defeated life? If he'd said to his friend and savior, I'm sorry but I'm a hopeless case; you'll just have to find someone else?

We'll never know and that's a good thing. The world was changed because he said Yes. He refused to be defined by his failure. Jesus had already blessed him, called him "the rock" on whom He would build his church. That's pretty high praise for a soon-to-be repeat offender.  

This is where the courage comes in. I'm learning that courage isn't about relying on our strong track record, our bravery, or our adequacy. It's about showing up. It's recognizing that failure isn't fatal. 

Courage has more to do with how we handle failure and not an inherent ability to avoid it altogether. 

Courage thirstily gulps down grace and lavishly passes around the cup to others. 

Courage falls down but gets back up. 

Courage doesn't always feel up to the invitation, but accepts it anyway.

For those who are in Christ, courage isn't about resting on our faithfulness but about leaning hard into His. 

If you're feeling a bit defeated today, there is such good news... 

You're not the sum total of your success or your failure. Receive the grace that is yours. Take courage in knowing how much you are loved. Embrace the freedom you were made for.  

When Coffee Spills All Over Your Sunday Morning

If I could summarize the path I've been on for the past eighteen months in just one word, it would be this: acceptance. Sure, it's also been about rest and simplicity and letting go. But I think acceptance trumps everything else. 

Truthfully I've been on this path for much longer than that, fighting forces and realities beyond my control with all the might I could muster. 

I've written on this topic more than I realized. You may be sick of reading about it actually. But the junk we wrestle has a way of coming to the surface doesn't it? I'll probably quit writing about it when I quit wrestling with it so if you want to bow out now, I don't blame you. 

Acceptance has influenced major life and family decisions. Putting my kids in public school after nearly five years of homeschooling--that boiled doing to accepting who I was and who I wasn't, what my circumstances were and what they were not. I'd gotten to the point where I was no longer capable of maintaining a healthy marriage, family, and home. I was unraveling in all sorts of unpleasant ways and we had to make a change. It's been the best thing for everyone. 

Acceptance has influenced the daily grind and extra endeavors. There are things I no longer attempt, ways in which I receive help from my husband and others because I have certain limitations. And there are things to which I say yes, not because I'm all that brave or confident but because I'm learning that I'm wired with certain attributes and God intends to use them. 

Acceptance has influenced my relationships with those I love most. Accepting my husband and my children {and other dear ones} for who they are and not for who I want them to be? It's everything. 

Last week my book study group discussed this issue of gentleness toward ourselves and its myriad implications. The particular quote from our book is this: 

Gentleness toward ourselves constitutes the core of our gentleness with others. When the compassion of Christ is interiorized and appropriated to self...the breakthrough into a compassionate stance toward others occurs. 

Historically I have not been gentle to those I love the most. Oh I may not always rant and rave and stomp about the house spouting insults and condemnation. {Though that has certainly happened a time or ten.} But I can seethe and nurse resentment like nobody's business. As hard as I can be on others, however, I happen to be cruelest with myself. 

Just when I think I'm beginning to understand all this grace business, I have a day of epic relapse and I wonder if I'll ever be ever to accept myself, screw-ups and all. I become so frustrated by my inability to overcome certain failures, serial failures that just won't go away, serial flaws that time and effort will just not erase...I have a meltdown and it is uglier than you can imagine. 

My most recent meltdown occurred Sunday. Church day. Which is always convenient and awesome. 

Before we could even get out the door, my mess-ups were too many to number. Mess-ups that affected the whole family and sabotaged our ability to make it to Sunday School. There were tears and self-loathing and ugly expletives, all of them mine. 

And to top off all of this Sunday morning stress, I knocked over a full, steaming travel mug of coffee on the way out the door and did you know that knocking over coffee when you're in a hurry somehow triples the volume of coffee? Did you also know that the force with which the coffee is toppled is directly proportionate to the distance the coffee splatters will travel? 

Imagine this tranquil Sunday morning scene...

The family is waiting in the van. The daughter is pouty that she's been rushed and that her hair is "dumb." The boys are fighting. One boy doesn't want to go to Sunday School altogether. And then there's me, the frantic mom who's just trying to get a family out the door and is it too much to ask for poor ol' mom to just have a mug of liquid alertness and sanity to sip on the way to church and why oh why when I am tired and hormonal and already consumed with my loser-ness do I have to knock hot coffee all the way to kingdom come and how did it drip down into the silverware drawer that was closed and into the cupboard of clean plastic-ware inside a door that was also closed and splatter to the outer reaches of my kitchen's radius? 

It was as if Satan himself had conspired against me. I scrambled to the door, the tears freely flowing at this point, and mouthed to my husband: I spilled coffee everywhere. Please help me. 

You may think I was being a bit hard on myself. Everyone accidentally spills stuff. But really, it wasn't that. The spilled coffee was simply the last straw. And truthfully, if I hadn't been in such a hurry I wouldn't have needed my coffee to go. I could trace the coffee to a million ways in which I'd failed before 9 am, failures that were ridiculously familiar and frequent and unshakable. 

The whole way to church I was consumed with comparison and defeat. The voice in my head took one crazy morning and went global with it; I was drinking from a fire hose of condemnation, literally choking on a deluge of shame and defeat. 

I wanted to go back home and I probably should have. My sweet husband looked at me as angry tears streamed down my face in the church parking lot. Unfortunately he is no stranger to such ugly, irrational scenes. He said this: You know, one of the beauties of the Gospel is that we're free from comparing ourselves to others. 

I will not tell you what I said in response because this is a family blog and my words were not G rated. They were not even PG-13 rated. It was a day in which I could not glimpse or grasp an ounce of beauty, fists clenched tight against grace, acceptance, and gentleness. I'd succumbed to the shame spiral and I was unyielding in my stubborn misery.

The resolution of my Sunday morning mess is still working itself out but here's what I'm forced to reckon with today. As much as I write about acceptance, about receiving your own life, as much as I believe it and desire it and would encourage you to drink from the overflowing cup of grace if you sat across from me with your own tear-streaked face, my default is still and may forever be performance.

Only God can change the way in which I'm hard-wired. And He is. I'm better than I used to be but days like Sunday show me I'm only one small step away from going off the cliff on any given day. Grace alone is the only thing that keeps me from permanent residence in the Valley of Defeat.  

Every day we have to do what our mamas told us way back when we were littles: When you fall down child, wipe yourself off and get back up. It's true. But somehow, little heretics that we were, we added something to our mamas' gospel: Get back up and try harder. 

If we believe in Grace and the One who is Grace, we know that it's actually not about trying harder at all. It's about rest, the opposite of try-hard. It's about breathing this prayer in and out, day in and day out:

I'm sorry I'm so consumed with my big self. Shame and self-loathing are actually pride. Refusing your love is also pride. Grant me humility, peace, and freedom. And thank you, thank you, for forgiveness. Help me to quit trying harder and to simply rest. To rest in what You've done for me. To rest in your promise to finish the work You began. To rest in the truth that You love me as I am and not as I should be. 

Or something like that. 

I'm still sort of in a failure funk. I'm not even fully repentant. {I blame busy-ness and distraction. They're always convenient scapegoats.} Grace and performance feel like an internal tug-of-war, sometimes more than others. But there's grace enough to at least listen to the Truth, to write about it today, to think on it, to catch just a glimpse of that "beauty" my husband spoke of in the Sunday parking lot.

I accept that it's all still working itself out, that I am loved wherever I am on the spectrum of my own expectations. And in the seemingly backwards way that God works, being loved so unconditionally in the midst of such messiness gently stirs my hardened heart and pushes my gaze upward instead of inward. 

Tug-of-war and all, I know I am loved as I am. I accept this beautiful Truth and I yield myself to be changed by the mysterious power of it. And today, that is enough. Every day, that is enough.

Life as a Ragamuffin

I can't get stuff right. 

Yesterday my dad's birthday came and went and I remembered at 5:40 this morning, a day late. That would be barely excusable except that it's the second year in a row I've remembered his birthday exactly one day too late. 

There was a glitch with my e-mails and since March 27th the techie powers-that-be have not sent my bellsouth e-mails to my gmail account so there's all this stuff I've missed, time-sensitive information...to which I never replied. Obviously. Now I just look like an idiot. Or apathetic. Or a slacker. Or all of the above. 

I didn't send in enough money for my daughter's field trip and my first words to her yesterday were snappy ones. Various members of my family do not have clean underwear at the beginning of the week. I tell them that they should let me know before they're completely out. They assume that a 4-foot high mountain of laundry is signal enough. 

I've been spending too much time wanting stuff that I can't have and not appreciating all that I do have, doing battle with idols of the heart and not loving very well and feeling a tad bit entitled to certain realities.

God, I'm such a mess, I thought to myself this morning. 

First thing Saturday I found out that I lost a friend and a mentor, one I've never met in real life. The world lost one of its best evangelists on Grace. Brennan Manning spent decades of his life speaking and writing about the lavish and limitless love of Jesus. 

His books are among my favorites. I've read and re-read a couple of them and just ordered another one this morning. As a matter of fact, I'm feebly facilitating a small group study of The Ragamuffin Gospel this semester and it has me wondering if I'll ever not need this good news for the "bedraggled, beat-up and burnt out." It's doubtful. 

And that's okay. 

Manning's final book was published in 2011. His memoir, All is Grace, is apparently part chronicle and part confession. He discusses his ongoing struggle with alcoholism, loneliness, self-hatred and marriage. Yes, even in the latter years of his life. He remained a ragamuffin in desperate need of grace until his dying day. 

Don't misunderstand. He didn't sin so that grace may increase; he was simply a man whose brokenness sometimes got the better of him. Just like me. Just like you.

My first reaction to that is a bristly one. I'm uncomfortable with the notion that someone so intimately connected with God, so knowledgable of his Word, so in pursuit of Christ could still stumble and struggle.

And if I'm painfully honest, I'm forced to admit that I long for the promise of near-perfection here on this earth. I want the assurance that I won't still dance with certain sins and that my loved ones won't relapse and that we'll all just eventually get our junk together. 

Accepting our mess, our loved ones' messes, our "professional Christians'" messes, it's counter-intuitive. I'm not talking about a blasé, "whatever" kind of acceptance. Our mess cost a perfect man his life; there's nothing flippant about that. But because of what Jesus did, I'm free to really live and really love and really forgive and and really trust and really receive love. I don't have to crucify myself or others over every infraction because the world crucified Christ and He accepted it. 

Refusing to bask in the glorious riches of His death and resurrection is like buying one's dream home and living in the cellar. What a waste. 

And what a denial of who we are and what He did to save us. He knew we'd have trouble. He knew we'd be trouble. He knew forgiveness would need to abound and that's why He said seventy times seven, that's how much you can forgive. And we can. We can because He did and his resurrection power pulses within all of us who believe in Him. 

Running as ragamuffins into the loving arms of Jesus is our only hope. We can fall down and start over as many times as it takes. His arms remain open, ready to receive us, mess and all. 

His arms received our dear friend last Friday and I wept, I really did, as I imagined him finally, safely in the arms of Abba. His feeble body, aged mind, and weakened spirit made perfect. Finally perfect. 

God promises that He loves us too much to leave us as we are but that's not a promise of perfection. It's a promise of presence. His presence, alive and at work in us. He accompanies my messed up self through all the foibles and follies and forgettings of today and tomorrow and every day after that. 

I'm not the person I once was yet I'm so far from the person I long to be. He loves me anyway with an everlasting, unchanging, unconditional love. 

His grace stretches like a canopy across my life, covering the good, the shameful, the redeemed, and the not yet. 

I lie beneath it, thankful that its length and breadth never ends and knowing that it is enough.

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A tribute to a life of Grace.