Tag: grace
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Fear and Grace
[Part 9 in Liz’s story of God’s calling her into inner city behavioral health care] For my undergraduate graduation, my college ministry group gave me a copy of When People are Big, and God is Small by Ed Welch. I took a look at the description on the back cover, which talks about people-pleasing and…
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Prayer and Umbrellas
[Part 6: After a brief break while transitioning, I’ve resumed the narrative of God’s calling me into counseling in an urban setting as part of a health care team. The first five parts covered June 2010 through October 2012. This entry takes us up to November 2012. Six or seven more installments, and the story…
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Cheap Justice, Cheap Grace
[Originally written for the ESN blog.] In watching people die, I have come to better appreciate how much meaning people attach to a body and how death has a way of revealing our most elemental beliefs about what remains. I have talked to patients in their final moments, have shoved long needles into pulseless vessels,…
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I am not above the charity of God
I was re-reading one of my favorite books, Blue Like Jazz, when the following excerpt hit me hard. At the end, there is a stunning quote worth meditating on. For a very long time, I could not understand why some people have no trouble accepting the grace of God while others experience immense difficulty. I counted…
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Grace!
I grew up with a mother who never took a gift… just half of an exchange. I remember watching, with horrified amusement, a lady try to give my mom a bag of mangoes. My mom chased her down and literally threw the bag into the open window of the car as it drove away. My…