I feel conviction this morning as I read the book I am enjoying (One Thousand Gifts). As I consider my life I don’t feel full of grace. I feel I am missing my call here at home. I have, at times, repelled my call here at home…confused by the many voices, within-without, of what the “role” should be. So I’ve neglected role altogether for some bastardized version of freedom. Agenderized myself for the illusion of something greater. Deeper than work or home, education or educating. It’s calling I consider. Calling. What is my call and how am I living it…or not?
Today I am keenly aware of my ability to make grace a ghost in my marriage. Interacting more heinously than the offense for which I feel so dignified in condemning. First things first: Where has been my own encounter with Grace? Why the closed Bible so many days? Why the closed heart? The pursed lips?
I have a hunch why I miss my call at home and grace becomes a ghost: I wait for another. My life contingent on someone else to go first. If I am to seek God, to know Him, I must act regardless of my perception of another. God at work within me is revealed in my simple desire to even know Him; He has clearly gone first. Is there any other impetus I need to “Grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ”?
So I must act if I am to call Grace to life in my home. As I decipher my call as wife and mother, this certainly is part. I don’t have to wear a “role” in order to accept a call. To live grace as a wife in my home will look specific to my own home. But if I neglect it and say, “but he…” I am still responsible for bringing death where I was called to bring life. If I am to invite life into my home, my marriage, my womb I must make space. New life cannot come without making space. And without grace, no space for life can be. Mostly true within my soul, which is where life within my home must begin. For I am called to be a life-giver, my expanding anatomy reminds me of such a call. There are no days I look to my husband and wonder why he is not bearing this child in my stead, there should be no day I look to him and expect him to live the call I feel in my own heart.
So, my prayer today:
Lord, help me redeem the word “role” that my culture has bastardized and lied to me about.
Help me joyfully accept my call from You, that Grace may walk these halls. Alive.
And, Lord, place blinders on my eyes that I may see only One, and thereby truly see.
Amen.
