Lighter Than a Ledger

"For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God." (Ephesians 2:8)

If the only time we trust God is when he gives us what we asked for, we are living in an elementary view of grace. That is not a criticism of anyone who is hurting. It is a diagnosis of a whole way of relating to God that we picked up somewhere and never examined, and it runs like this: prayer is a system, input goes in, output comes out, and if the output does not come, the system has malfunctioned, and either I broke it or he did.

But grace is not a system. Grace is a person deciding to be good to you, and a person cannot be operated like a machine. You do not get leverage on love by pressing the right buttons.

And here is the thing we do not expect. The elementary view is exhausting. It is far more labor than trust. You have to monitor every outcome. You have to keep a running ledger of answered and unanswered. You have to read every ordinary event as a coded message, and when nothing happens you have to decide what the nothing says about you. Trust is lighter than that. Not easier, lighter. There is a difference, and you only discover it on the far side of laying the ledger down. So put it down. Stop auditing God for evidence of his goodness, and let grace be what it has always been, a Person, freely good, who cannot be worked but can be trusted.