Grace
"Too often I think of grace as a clean slate, a pardon from my past life, but that is more like neglect. Grace is not a redo. It is not like starting a new journal. Grace is the ink on those pages, the very presence of God walking me through it, in sickness and in health, for better and for worse, until death brings us together. Grace is the shelf bearing the weight of pages past, putting on display the way God holds everything together and works everything out just the way He wants it. Grace exposes my wishes to level the playing field between God and me, to be good enough. Grace does not hide from the messy reality of my ragged and duplicitous life, or in vain imaginations of starting over. How could it? That is precisely where grace intends to live and move, to renovate the broken stuff in my life, to help me work out this salvation with fear and trembling". - Will Walker "The Kingdom of the Couches"