Transparency and Grace

I was coming off a high. On Mother's Day my youngest son honored me in church as part of a video segment where some of the youth and children told why their moms were great moms. Scott's cameo came last and was very touching as he thanked me for my support as a single mom who loved and cared for him unconditionally. The same Sunday he was baptized, confirming an adult decision to follow Christ at a more intense and purposeful level.

Scott pulled me aside about an hour before we were to go to the home where our small church baptizes its member in the family pool. He read aloud the part of his testimony concerning me and the struggles he has overcome and all the sudden I am not so great a mom. I am an all too human mom with some glaring character defects. These defects have affected him and he has confronted the pain he feels as the result of these defects with a sponsor and a counselor as he has worked out his salvation and God's call on his life.

"Is it OK if I read that?" he asks.

My hearts sinks and I want to crawl away. We have discussed these issues privately at the suggestion of my counselor and have an ongoing dialog as we work these issues out. Immediately I want to defend myself, but I tell him, "of course."

He asks, "How does it make you feel?"

"Horrible," I confess, "and I want to defend myself, but it is not the place or time. It is your testimony and I will entrust it to God. After Pastor Dave's very transparently talk about his anger this morning, I at least feel safe with my church family for you to speak the truth in love."

Scott wasn't trying to condemn me just express a struggle he had with feeling loved and how my past behavior prevented him from knowing it fully.

Showing up at the baptism with my camera, I soon become the official photographer of the event. A technique I use to both hide behind and reach out to people. I am still new in the church and I like having this choice today.

The baptism was extraordinary. Scott invited many friends and many of them came. I wasn't really embarrassed. I know the story of many of my church family. I felt safe. We as a church have made a choice to confront difficult life issues. The church for that reason is a place of healing. There is testimony after testimony of it week in and week out. Scott is just one of many who have allowed God to deal with his past and move on to healing and restoration. A life of grace doesn't come without a life committed to transparency. Hidden sin keeps grace retained and unavailable to the believer.

Me, I spent an agonizing few days grieving that the child I love so thoroughly somehow missed that love, or questioned it too often. I remember singing him to sleep, holding him in my arms. I ache to be able to hold him like that again.

Scott and I picked up our dialog mid week and I was able to share my heart again with him and tell him he was truly loved in word and deed because he was important to me.

I began to see that like my love for Scott grace can be missed and sin becomes a barrier to knowing it fully. We are to confess our sins to one another. I need daily to extend grace because the pain of unforgiveness blocks the joy I have in salvation.

Scott's life has been touched by grace and he extends it to me over and over again as we venture the rocky road of a divorced family. We have decided like our church family to live a life of transparency and grace having left the barren ways of pretense and blame. God blesses us daily with a genuine love for one another.

Ephesians 3:14-19 (NIV)

For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom his whole family in heaven and on earth derives its name. I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge-that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.