I have not always believed God’s grace sufficient.  I have known the words, the promise, but not always felt their reality.  I was once a young mom with a sick baby unconsolable… who would stop breathing in our arms, leaving an empty bassinet at my bedside, even as my milk letdown…

As I sang words of God’s grace yesterday in church the images returned, of the bleak drive that rainy morning to the cemetery where the wee casket lay so unreal…as we sang, “Jesus loves me, this I know…” God’s grace was there, but it did not eliminate the crushing loss.  It shielded us, grew us up, taught us love is more than good feelings. And babies are not always born healthy and whole.  Grace has shaped our lives.  It has always been there though I doubted its efficacy.

But today, I am at the opposite end of that journey. I woke with this song still singing through my heart calming my pre-trip-packing jitters.  I’m breathing in your grace, breathing out your praise… I got up to enjoy the quiet and as I sat in the sun-flooded warmth jotting down these thoughts, the phone rang to announce the sweet news–another baby has been born into my world.  My own daughter’s first child, a strapping baby boy with a great shock of dark hair like his mother before him.  He is alive. He is well.  God’s great grace has carried him and his mama and his daddy through a long waiting and labor.  But he is born.

And my heart, a lot older, and a little wiser, sings, knowing it is true–God’s grace is there in the newborn cry /It’s there in the light of every sunrise / It’s there on a wedding day / There in the weeping by the graveside —God’s great grace. It finds me.

And it is enough.