Grace and Broken Branches

"If grace is an ocean we're all sinking..."

I love little kids. I love the funny stuff they say, I love how creative they are, I love how innocent they are, I love teaching them new stuff about the world. And maybe most of all, I love kids' imaginations.

I was babysitting for a little boy the other day, and in his room, he had a spider made out of pipe cleaners, a ladybug made from clay, a flower made from construction paper, and a frog cut from a coloring sheet. When I asked him about it, he casually replied, "Oh, those are from the other day when I made a rain forest." I love that.

I know when I was little, I made up all sorts of things. A stick was a sword. Couch cushions were a rocket ship. My stuffed animals were an audience. The floor was hot lava. Legos were a towering skyscraper.

Little kids seem to have an inherent ability to see things, not for what they are, but for what they could be.

When we grow up, we lose some of that. Sure, we can still play pretend with little ones, but we don't really see the stick as a sword. We see it as a stick. We name it "pretend". Whereas two four-year-olds might actually argue over what the stick is supposed to represent, we are much more mature than that. It's a stick and nothing but a stick.

Of course, it's a good thing to grow up. It's natural to mature. If there were two forty-year-olds fiercely shouting "No, it's a sword!" "No, it's a fairy wand!" in the middle of the office, there would be an obvious problem.

But I think God works a little like those little kids.

See, we're the stick. We're the ugly, broken twig lying in the dirt. Because really, what would a broken branch have to offer? It doesn't do anything. It can't be grown into a tree. It's broken - it's worthless.

But God doesn't see us as the broken branch. God sees us for what we could be.

That's what grace is, really. God could have looked down at me and said, "Look at her. She's worthless. What has she got to offer me? She's broken, lying in her own sin." But he didn't. He looked at me and said, "Wow! Think what I could do with her! She's not a loser...I can make her beautiful, I can use her to further my cause."

And so he offered me grace. He picked up this broken branch and washed off the dirt with his own precious blood. He sanded off the messy bits and held me up and proclaimed me beautiful. God saw past what I was, to what I could be.

God sees my potential. What do I do in return? I will do anything I can to fulfill this potential, to live the life that he wants me to live, to be used in the ways he wants to use me.

God saw what I could be. And at the end of my life, I want to present myself to him, as a living representation of what I could be...now become what I am.