Grace.

I hate you.

I love you, but also I hate you. You defy me.

“We are a team of grace,” she said. “You must be willing to give grace and you must be willing to receive grace.”

My team leader and I had dinner a few nights ago. We talked about a hundred things, many of which had to do with how cool it is for me to be entering Unterwegs (the name of our group) at this point in time. The amount of work that others who came before me have done has tilled the ground of Tübingen in a way that means I get an unprecedented network of unearned connections in my first weeks in the country. The amount of support we have from people in the community here is unlike it has ever been. I have landed in a privileged place… one very much unearned.

This means that on my first day in the country a group of 10 students welcomed me at a lunch gathering, excited by my presence even though they did not know me yet. This means that on my first day of language school, the headmistress greeted me with an exuberant warmth and figured out a way to get me extra tutoring for free, because I was a part of a group that she had come to cherish. This means that eight days into my move, I found myself eating Black Forrest cake in the home of an older German couple who had decided that they would love me before they even met me.

It’s beautiful. It’s profound. It leaves me reeling. Because as much as I think I understand what God is doing in all of this, my on-the-way-ness betrays me still.

My mind moves to Philosophy. There are two thoughts that mesh together that serve as helpful tools to me right now. Venture with me into the realm of my nerdiness for a moment.

There was a German man named Martin Heidegger who, in his attempts to understand the world around him, began using the term “thrown” or “thrownness.” He saw that humans never really have a “starting point” but instead find themselves in the middle of a story already, having been “thrown” into a moving existence.

One of his philosophical heirs was a Frenchman named Maurice Merleau-Ponty. He built on one of Heidegger’s other thoughts and wrote a lot about how we always understand things in relationship to contexts. As humans, we are always in a context and that context both limits us and contributes to us. It becomes the background by which we understand the things we focus on.

Good job. You made it through my geek moment. Give yourself a high five. I give you those ideas because I am starting to see something about what God is doing in these terms. I’m starting to see one way that Gospel is being born in and around me in these terms.

And that somewhere is Grace. Unearned. Unwarranted.You see, I have been thrown into something here that is fascinatingly unique in a way that I could never have prepared for. I have picked up my life and moved into a new land, into a new background. I have joined a team and a community. I have landed somewhere.

Inconsiderate of my preferences or ability to contribute, this grace is giving me more belovedness than I know how to ingest. It tells me that whether I like it or not, this is where I belong and that my incompetence cannot change it. It whispers promises of good things to come, if only I would submit to the current of her tide.

But this is hard. I fight it. I want control. I feel pride swell up in me, telling me to reject the kindness of others. I feel fear taunt me with thoughts of being deceived, of being made a fool by all of this.

I suppose that’s the way that broken people usually encounter love.

I suppose that moment of courage that we call faith comes before the stillness of acceptance.

I’m still fighting with it. But I suppose that’s also the tricky thing about Grace – it’s still there when I am ready to give in.

Still Wandering,

Tony