Prayer Beads and Grace

I am looking at the prayer beads I made in our Lenten group. They aren’t fancy by any means. I really

like all the prayer beads that everyone made. They are colorful, but I wanted mine to look a bit rough so it has small wooden and black stone beads.

As Barb led us through the process of making them, I found that I was moving ahead before I should. I ended up having to start over because I crimped a tube that needed to stay open until the end. Oops! Maybe that’s a metaphor for my journey. I work on steps, and hear the next step, and think I know what the next one will be, but I get it wrong. Fortunately, I was able to start over and not delay the whole group much.

In my faith journey, thank goodness that there is grace along the way. In my eagerness to progress, I sometimes get ahead of my self, finding that I needed to wait. There are always consequences to that misstep, usually small, sometimes larger.

At Midweek Prayer, we talked about when a veil lifts and we see and know what we have done, we get a taste of truth that does not sit well in our mouths, or our stomachs. For many who are not aware of the grace that helps us deal with the truth, they will often shut the veil and try to forget, or the taste will so overwhelm them they think there is no hope.

The grace is there, waiting to help us accept the truth, but not let it end with only acceptance. It will help us move on towards helping make right what we have done wrong. It will helps us grow in wisdom.

That grace is God’s love, offered to us freely in the fullness of the Three-in-One, giving us life, setting us free, helping us to “grow into the fullness of the measure of the stature of Christ (RSV).” And so the opening of the veil to see the truth is a part of the grace too. May I receive it so.

Ephesians 4:13

Until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ.