Saturday grace is beautiful grace. Saturday grace can take your breath away. Sunsets that make you stop whatever you’re doing because, for a moment, taking in their beauty becomes the most important thing. A ranch that takes neglected, abused horses and pairs them with neglected, abused children and somehow both, all, are healed. Saturday grace is the kindness of strangers, especially when we’ve screwed up. Saturday grace is that there are still kind souls in this world.

I started this series because I was seeing too much evil and ugly in this world and I can’t make it go away. I can’t pray it away. I could bury my head in the sand or make myself numb, but doing so wouldn’t solve anything nor help either of us. I can point out where hope remains. I can remind myself why we might hope, in spite of all we see and hear. I can change my focus and look for light instead of darkness. So I decided it was time to talk about grace again.

Mountains and oceans and flowers and birds are grace. Music we love is grace. Dancing can be grace. Practicing your art form and feeling that moment–that moment, when it clicks, when you find the elusive “it”–that is grace, a gift from God-Who-Is-Creator who made us co-creators.

Saturday grace is the unmistakeable grace we still see in the world, the grace that anyone with an open heart, regardless of beliefs, must recognize. When we’ve blown off a friend who, instead of guilt-tripping us, shows us extra understanding and offers their support, this is Saturday grace. We sometimes miss grace because we mistake kindness and generosity for what we have coming to us. Saturday grace is that moment when we know we didn’t have it coming.

Martin Luther wrote, “If you could understand a single grain of wheat, you would die of wonder.”

Saturday grace means seeing the world as full of grace. It means not imagining that this is merely what we deserve–which is the opposite of grace–but grasping that this is how much God loves us and this is the love God wants to show us.

Ephesians 3, The Message:

I ask him that with both feet planted firmly on love, you’ll be able to take in with all followers of Jesus the extravagant dimensions of Christ’s love. Reach out and experience the breadth! Test its length! Plumb the depths! Rise to the heights! Live full lives, full in the fullness of God.

In the end, “grace” is a way to say “God loves you, and God’s love in action looks like this.”

And guess what?

Grace is greater than you think it is.