Life not fair

I was sitting in the car this morning in the parking lot, gathering all the stuff that I take into the lab with me each day. A CD was playing, but I wasn't listening with very much attention. I was enjoying the music, though, because it was fast and loud, which was my preference this morning.

A line popped out of the song, and just stopped me. WOW.

I liked it so much, I emailed it out to my Sunday school class this morning. (As a sidenote -- I've been thinking this morning about email, and how I use it. Part of what I do at church is to recruit volunteers to handle certain short term jobs. I do a lot of this by email, so I end up sending out a lot of emails to a lot of people. I don't care to do that -- it's really the only way that I can think of to do this church job. I hestitated this morning to send out an email with the quote I'm about to tell you, because I have a feeling that when the members of my Sunday school class open their email accounts this morning, they are going to say, "Oh, crap. Another one from Kim." It's not really what you want your friends saying when they get an email from you. I feel like a pest, and it's one of the not-so-great consequences of what I'm doing in the church.)

Anyway, back to this great song lyric.

The song that was playing on the CD was Be My Escape by Reliant K. The song is about the ruts we get into in life (which would make a whole other blog post), but the line which really caught my attention was this:

The beauty of grace is that it makes life not fair.

If you have more than one child, you probably spend a large part of your time trying to make life fair (or at least I do). Have you ever counted out cookies? Tried to pour the same amount of milk into two glasses? Who's turn is it? Why does he get to stay up late, and I don't? IT'S NOT FAIR!

We teach our children to play nice, to take turns, to do what is fair. Fair is linked to justice -- we expect justice to be "fair." Our country's ideals are even built on fairness -- "All men are created equal."

Could it be that this is why we have such a hard time accepting that grace is a gift? It is unnatural. It is against everything we have been taught as children and that we teach our children. We should have to earn it; we should have to work hard for it.

And yet...

The beauty of grace is that it makes life not fair.

We can't make God love us any more, or any less -- He loves us perfectly already. We can't earn His forgiveness -- He's given it to us already. We can't understand it, because our ideal is fairness. It isn't fair -- that's the beauty of it -- that's what makes it AMAZING.

Thank God for grace, because it makes life not fair.

Image: The sky across the street from our house. I'm telling you, we have a beautiful sky across the street -- over and over again.