Receive.

This whole life is grace, I'm learning.

It fills every corner of my mind as I awake each morning, eyes groggy but mercies renewed.

Sunlight. Walk to school. Cup of coffee. Pouring Rain. All counted as grace. As I look around, the whole world is screaming His grace from every direction. All of it. Even our existence - it all began with grace.

I picture a cup overflowing. The water pouring out and splashing over, hitting the table and the floor and continuing to run. This is His grace for me.

I picture the sun rising. Its rays spilling into every crevice of the earth and filling it with light, shining through the cold obscurity of the night, glorious and victorious. This is His grace for me.

How can I not respond? Even when things happen that don't make sense, that I don't understand, that I would never have fathomed happening. It's grace and grace and more grace and that is all I can seem to wrap my mind around lately. This idea of how God lavishes grace gifts onto His children. He never stops. It's continual. It's over us, under us, before us, after us, in us, through us, around us, surrounding us. And every day I wake up and I thank God for the ability He has given me to see these gifts of grace because I know it is nothing in me and everything from Him.

But I hunt for more - I long to see more and more and more because once I realize the overwhelming beauty and abundance and simplicity of the gifts He loves to give, I want to learn how to receive. So I probe, explore and rummage through the things that seem so everyday, so ordinary, so mundane - knowing that the grace gifts are there, just waiting to be received.

And by receiving them, these grace gifts, I feel myself drawing closer to the heart of God and the more I draw into this heart that beats so surely for me, the closer I desire to be.

So I open my eyes to see more deeply and I open my hands to receive more fully - and my heart is opened and I am made whole, over and over again.

// colorful kites in the park // National Donut Day // sunlight and Spanish // fallen flower //

// mornings with Oswald // view from my gate in the morning // morning dew drops // coffee //