grace...

it's super fantastic that i go to a school i absolutely love and are in classes that have impacted me in so many areas of my life. i read this the other day and really, really loved it. Sometimes i am unable to articulate thoughts and emotions, beliefs, memories. Lucky for us, we have great writers in this world who are able to capture what we cannot at times.

This is my life. This is what i constantly fall into.

"Sooner or later we are confronted with the painful truth of our inadequacy and insufficiency. Our security is shattered and our bootstraps are cut. 
Once the fervor (intense and passionate feeling) has passed, weakness and infidelity appear. 
We discover our inability to even add a single inch to our spiritual stature. 
There begins a long winter of discontent that eventually flowers into gloom, pessimism, and subtle despair-subtle because it goes unrecognized, unnoticed, and therefore unchallenged. It takes the form of boredom, drudgery. We are overcome by the ordinariness of life, by daily duties done over and over again. We secretly admit that the call of Jesus is just too demanding, that surrender to the Spirit is beyond our reach. We start acting like everyone else. Life takes a joyless, empty quality...our huffing and puffing to impress God, our scrambling for brownie points, our thrashing about trying to fix ourselves while hiding our pettiness and wallowing in guilt are nauseating to God and and are a flat out denial of the Gospel of grace." -Brennan Manning 

I laughed after i read that thinking "that is so me." 

The author also captured an aspect of Grace i had never thought about before, which was super challenging. 

"Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life...It strikes us when, year after year, the longed-for perfection does not appear, when the old compulsions reign within us as they have for decades, when despair destroys all joy and courage. Sometimes in that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a verse were saying, "You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything, do not perform anything, do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted." If that happens to us, we experience grace." -Paul Tillich