STRUCK BY GRACE:

You Are Loved

We love because he first loved us.

—1 John 4:19

"Accept that you are accepted." When I read this as a college student, those words by Paul Tillich jolted me into a new understanding of God's unconditional love. The pivotal first element in our walk of faith—the practice of Radical Hospitality—involves our saying Yes to God's love for us, a willingness to open our lives to God and invite God into our hearts. It involves our capacity to receive grace, accept Christ's love, and make room for God in our lives.

"Do we know what it means to be struck by grace?" Tillich asks. This was a provocative notion to me, an odd metaphor, to describe God's grace as something that strikes, that jars us into a new way of thinking, that collides with our old way of being. He continues, "We cannot transform our lives, unless we allow them to be transformed by that stroke of grace." The first movement toward the new creation, the transformed life, and becoming the person God wants us to be begins when we face the startling reality of God's unconditional love for us. Receiving the love and forgiveness of God, beginning to comprehend its meaning, and opening ourselves to the new life it brings can be as disrupting as an earthquake, as abrupt as lightening striking across the black night sky. It means we've been struck by grace.

The personal practice of Radical Hospitality begins with a receiving, perceiving, listening, opening, accepting attitude—a readiness to accept and welcome God's initiative toward us. It is sustained with active behaviors that place us in the most advantageous posture to continue to receive God, welcome Christ, and make room for grace. And so it involves interior decision and soul work, a listening and receptivity to God, as well as habits that transform us as we regularly, frequently, and intentionally make room in our lives for God.

Grace strikes at unexpected times, Tillich suggests: when we are in pain, feeling restless, empty, alone, estranged, or when we feel disgust, weakness, or hostility. It strikes us when other things don't work, when we feel directionless and useless, when compulsions reign, and darkness overshadows. When the ordinariness of life grinds us down, or the vacuity of the world's promises leaves us empty, when we finally realize our churning and churning is taking us nowhere fast, in such moments, grace comes to us like a wave of light in the darkness, and we perceive a voice saying, "You are accepted."

"We don't know the name of it at the time; there will be much to learn later," Tillich writes. We don't have to promise anything at the time, for in that moment we are fundamentally the recipients of a promise. We don't have to give anything; only to receive what is given. Our only and singular task is to accept that we are accepted.

You are loved. You are loved. You are loved. Can you accept that?

God's love for us is not something we have to strive for, earn, work on, or fear. It is freely given. That is key: that we are loved, first, finally, and forever by God, a love so deep and profound and significant that God offers his Son to signify and solidify this love forever so that we get it.

The journey to becoming what God would have us to be begins with opening ourselves to this love, and giving it a place in our hearts. The journey begins when the God "up there" or "out there," the God whom we perceive as some philosophical abstraction, becomes a living truth and a love that we receive into ourselves. The welcoming requires of us an extraordinary hospitality, a radical receptivity, a willingness to allow God to come in and dwell within our hearts.

I first read Tillich's essay while sitting on grass near a fountain outside a campus library on a bright spring morning. I'd been active in church for years and was contemplating the call to ministry. I was rethinking the faith of my childhood and struggling with the normal things college students wrestle with. I was more clear about what I did not believe than about what I did believe. A student group at church was reading Tillich, a well-known theologian, and I was doing my assignment.

Tillich described those things that separate us from God and one another. He wrote about feeling unaccepted and about striving to prove, earn, justify, or validate ourselves. This resonated deeply with the feelings of uncertainty, pain, and struggle that I experienced as a student wrestling with the expectations of parents, the pressure of peers, the yearning to fit in, the desire to make a difference. His words somehow stimulated a rush of thoughts about life's meaning, connection, and direction. I kept looking up from the text to the fountain, lost in my own thoughts, yet soothed by whispers of flowing water. The Spirit was breaking through, stirring my soul, and moving me to deeper places.

Accept that you are accepted. In the moment that grace strikes, grace conquers sin. Lingering guilt that has grown tumor-like for years in the dark recesses of a person's soul can lose its deathly power. Grace helps us face the truth about ourselves, to embrace it rather than run from it; and by embracing this truth and offering it to God, we discover that God knows the truth about us and still loves us, and that God will shape us from this day forward anew. God's been waiting for us, desiring us to let him in. Can we accept that we are accepted?

Grace, when we really absorb its full meaning and consequence, causes us to rethink the direction and momentum of our lives, to change course, to break through the pretense and pride and see ourselves as we really are—utterly and completely unable by our own striving and effort to make it all work. The love of God pierces the veneer, breaks through the resistances, pulls us out of ourselves, and takes us into the deepest of mysteries of the spiritual life. Our worth is grounded in God's grace.

JUST SAY YES!

When we finally get it, and open our hearts to the truth of God's love for us, we begin to receive glimpses of a peace that the world cannot give or take away, an inner assurance about our ultimate worth in God's eyes that surpasses understanding.

God creates us. God loves us. God desires a relationship with us. In the revealing moment, our singular task is not to harden our hearts but to open them to God, to open our lives to grace, to receive, and to say Yes. Radical Hospitality begins by welcoming God in rather than slamming the door closed.

Have you ever been struck by grace?

Reading those words by Tillich more than thirty years ago, I could see so many of the events of my faith journey with greater clarity, the initiative of God's grace reaching out to me through the lives of many people. God has wanted in.

I experienced the feeling of life beginning anew, taking hold. In that moment, the rest of my life was given to me as a gift.

Accept that you are accepted. Open the doors of your heart.

A Look at Grace

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Can you remember one moment in your life that...