I had a dream last night that shook me to the core. In my dream, I had just finished grabbing breakfast with a friend, and when I got back in my car, we found a group of small children hiding on the floor of the backseat. There were four of them and they were siblings. The next part of the dream was me trying to figure out where these kids lived and trying to get them back home. As I attempted to navigate my way through a really bad neighborhood, the oldest girl who was around seven or eight shared with me, in terms a small child would use, that she was experiencing all kinds of sexual abuse from the adult male in their home. They had crawled into my car and were hiding in the backseat in order to stay out of their house and stay safe for a little while. She was clinging to me, asking for help. The next scene in the dream was me returning the kids to their home and trying to get a picture of the house number with my phone so I could return with CPS and the police. As I was doing that, a man came out and tried to stab me. I tried to block it with my hands, and in my dream, during the confrontation with this man, my car was stolen. I ended up walking away from their house with a bleeding hand, and a deep resolve that I was coming back to that house to get those kids out of that situation. Then I woke up.
I immediately experienced a groggy sense of relief that it was just a dream. I was not lost in a dangerous neighborhood. My car had not just been stolen. My hand was not bleeding. I didn’t need to do anything about the kids because they were not real. It was only a dream.
I lay there trying to process what I had dreamed when I felt this heavy ache in my heart and knew with an awful certainty that those children are absolutely real. I usually just encounter them 15 to 30 years later in their lives.
I sat there trying to wrap my mind around the question of why some kids grow up in situations like that and others grow up in homes filled with love and safety.
A line I have heard a million times drifted across my mind- “But for the grace of God, there go I.” I truly wonder why people say that. As if some of us have been given a special grace to avoid that kind of suffering. As if the little ones who experience horrors like this are not on the receiving end of God’s grace? What do we even mean when we say that?
I understand and acknowledge that the choices made by the people around us directly impact us. I know that whether someone is a believer or not, there are principles and truths you can apply that will set you up for a better life and that directly impacts generations. That itself is a common grace.
But I also know that you don’t choose whose family or what community you are born into. You don’t choose what you are taught or not taught by the people in your life. Children don’t choose to be abused and harmed by the adults in their lives. They don’t choose to live in poverty or to never be taught right from wrong. So where is the grace there?
If comfort and safety is the grace of God in so many of our lives, my question is why? What is the reason for that grace? If we have been given safety, comfort, education, wealth and health, what is the purpose of that grace in our lives?
What should the grace given to us do through us in the lives of others?
All of these questions are running through my head today as I process this and I am left with one question.
What if part of God’s grace to them is supposed to be us?
What if someday they could say, “But for the grace of God, he might have ignored the prompting of the Holy Spirit to come visit me when I was in prison.”
But for the grace of God, she may not have made that phone call when my hope had run out.
But for the grace of God, they might not have invited me to come to church with them.
But for the grace of God, they might not have prayed fervently for me.
But for the grace of God, he might not have shared the gospel with me.
But for the grace of God, she may not have fought for me throughout my addiction.
But for the grace of God, they might have done nothing with the grace they had been given.
But for the grace of God.
I think of Jesus. Talk about God’s grace given to us. He, who had no needs. The King of Heaven, at the right hand of the Father- “emptied himself of all but love, and bled for Adam’s helpless race.” That is grace.
Precious Church, hands and feet of Jesus, we may be the very instruments of grace God plans to use in the lives of the hurting and the broken. Maybe He is trying to pour out grace on them through you. Are we open to that? Are we willing to listen to His leading? Are we willing to leave our comfort zone for the sake of the one?
What if God’s grace to them is supposed to be us?
willnotbetaken 