I will forever be amazed by the gospel's permeation of the world around us. God truly is crying out to us from every nook and cranny of the universe, begging our attention. I just finished watching a silly, sometimes vulgar movie with my parents, entitled "Mother" (Debbie Reynolds, Albert Brooks). As the main character in this movie, a writer, struggles to understand his mother's persistent non-support of anything he is or does, he becomes increasingly convinced that she hates him. At the climax of the tale he discovers that his mother was a writer in her youth, but had to give it up to be a "good" mother. As he imagines the pain this must have caused her, he comes face to face with the source of her resentment, and says an immensely insightful thing: she is a failure.

On this surface, this may seem a terrible thing to say, but it is really very healthy. In recognizing that his mother is a failure, the character also recognizes that she is not a monster. She was never intentionally malicious, just fumblingly benign. She never wanted to hurt them, she just did a bad job of helping them. And in the light of this new discovery, he first offers, then receives, grace.

Of course God's grace goes even farther than this, loving us while we were His enemies, but there still exists the motion from viewing someone as enemy to viewing them as, however bad a friend they may be, a friend.

And it makes me thankful for the God who takes initiative...who didn't wait for me to come around, but aggressively pursued my friendship. He is the God who loves. He is the God of action. He is the God of grace.

I love Him.