Hello! JWelcome
to my blog, House Of Grace.
It’s the first blog I’ve written, so I expect it will have it’s
rough-around-the-edges moments. But my prayer and hope is that it will bless
those who read it and will motivate me in penning what is essentially
reflection on the stuff of life in the kingdom of God.
I started this blog with the title ‘Grace in the stephome’
but decided to change it to ‘House of Grace’ for two reasons. One is that I
wanted to bless my friends, nuclear families in the vast majority (by God’s
grace, hence I wanted to make the theme more relevant to others) and secondly
because I believe that our microcosm picture of this ‘House of Grace’ in our homes – if indeed it is seen!- is
pictured in the macrocosm of the church throughout history. I became a
stepparent fairly recently, and all sorts of new challenges and questions were
thrown my way, all of which in some way or another will always be there but the
dust has settled (meaning it's not driving me loopy at the moment, not that I've swept it under the carpet but that I'm happier to change and grow as a result of it!); in the settling of the dust I realised that the challenge to
live with grace in the home is not relevant to stepparenting alone, but to the
entirety of life this side of eternity, and to the workplace, the nuclear
family, discipleship and more! I am
constantly challenged about how to live and respond with grace to my
stepchildren, but also to friends, family, colleagues, in all circumstances and even at times (!) my husband.
Way back in the day, Israel was to be God’s grace to the
nations, a house of grace. The House of Grace. And the temple played a huge
part in that picture – the Temple was where God met with his people. Solomon
prayed that if foreigners, not of God’s people Israel came to the temple ‘for
the sake of your great name and your mighty hand and your outstretched arm’ ,
that God would hear them and do ‘according to all which the foreigner calls to
you, in order that all the peoples of the earth may know your name and fear
you, as do your people Israel...’ . Jesus came because Israel did not want to
bless the nations – Jesus threw out those selling and buying in the temple areas
where the Non-Jewish God fearing people were allowed to worship saying “Is it
not written ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations’?
But you have made it a den of robbers.” The church is not designed to be an
exclusive club for believers, but a light for the nations, a light in the
culture around us, representing the God of all nations.
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| Mrs Clennam from the BBC production of Little Dorrit, by Dickens http://www.bbc.co.uk/littledorrit/characterandcast/mrsclennam.shtml |
Another weirder reason for the name stems from reflecting on what I want to avoid being. That is the House of Clennam of ‘Little Dorrit’ by Charles Dickens. Plot spoiler alert. The House of Clennam is physically
an old building falling down, anybody can see it is ready to collapse. At the
centre of this building is Mrs Clennam, crippled by her lack of forgiveness of
her late husband and certain of her righteousness before God for her own
impeccable behaviour in comparison to her husbands ‘foolish sinful weakness’,
when in fact she is hiding a dark deep sin of her own; Mr Clennam junior - hero in the story- is
not Mrs Clennam's son and she has deprived him of a warm, loving relationship with herself,
just as she has snatched away the love of his real mother, who died broken-hearted parted from her child. I reflected on the pretence of moral uprightness of this woman, clutching her bible and certain that her sin is hidden, and how we can find ourselves behaving in similar way sometimes. Afraid of uncovering our deeply ingrained and serious sin we keep ourselves neat and tidy and do not confess our sin, hiding it and comparing our 'surface' sin with other people's 'surface' sin. Mrs Clennam is an extreme picture, but the reality is here in the church. It's in me.
The reason I don't have to be afraid of revealing my dark, deep sin is that Jesus has signed his own name against it. He's flung it into infinity ' as far as the East is from the West. That's how far he has removed our transgressions from us'.
Let's be real, the gloopy slime of the real us can be hideous, but to share our lives with others, we need to get serious about tearing down the moral façade. Let's get messy. Let's be church.
