sometimes grace is a friend
As your Christmas cards decorate our mail with friendship, I give thanks. I walk down the road, swinging my arms, telling God how He’s always provided someone.
I read your notes, happy to see the curves of your handwriting, as personal to you as your fingerprints. I smile when you apologize, thinking your penmanship a blemish. We hang your pictures from the door of the coat closet, tying them with ribbon on yards of gold mesh. The kids look again and again, pointing out faces they know, asking for stories of the others. They think it amazing that I have cousins, too, that their grandparents have siblings and even once grew up with them, laughing, fighting, running barefoot, playing imaginary games. They love you because we love you. Your life has blessed ours, woven deep in the tapestry of living. God provided you, specifically you, when we needed something only you could offer us—love, family, understanding, friendship, inspiration, faith, hope.
I read your letters with a cup of coffee in my hand, crying over your tragedies, your heartache, laughing with you over triumphs. I walk, and I give thanks, and I think of David and Jonathan. I think of Elizabeth. I think about how God never asks us to do the humanly impossible without providing someone to remind us how to breathe. He never leaves us. And at the same time He breathes Spirit-power deep into the soul, He touches us through human hands.
Six months before Mary’s encounter with Gabriel, half a year before the angel would trouble her with the words “you who are highly favored,” God spoke to an old priest in the Holy of Holies, literally left the man speechless, and planted the seed of a son in an unlikely, withered womb. Elizabeth. She had carried John six months before Mary stepped on her front stoop, the son of God knit together within her small frame, barely a bump. Elizabeth had likely already had her fair share of doubt and looks and skepticism from the neighbors. She knew what it meant to be called of God to the humanly impossible.
I’ve always loved that just when Mary’s standing there, knowing it will be but asking how, the angel Gabriel first explains the miracle: God will conceive this child in you by the Holy Spirit. Then immediately he continues, “Even Elizabeth your relative is going to have a child in her old age, and she who was said to be barren is in her sixth month. For nothing is impossible with God (Luke 2: 36, 37; emphasis mine).”
And after Mary says that remarkable, surrendered thing, “I am the Lord’s servant. May it be to me as you have said (Luke 2:38),” she does what any woman would do. She hurries to Elizabeth. God had provided someone who would understand, someone who would believe. And not only that. God had provided someone who would prophesy on His behalf and say the things Mary most needed to hear.
When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the baby leaped in her womb, and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit. In a loud voice, she exclaimed, ‘Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the child you will bear! But why am I so favored, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? As soon as the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy. Blessed is she who has believed that what the Lord has said to her will be accomplished (Luke 2: 41-45)!
For six months, Elizabeth’s husband had been writing everything down and lifting it to her eyes, unable to say a word. Elizabeth knew what it was not to believe. And already God had woven the recognition of the Christ into John’s soul, before his physical body had even been completely shaped by divine fingers. Elizabeth is the grace Mary needed, the answer to the always-promise of God, “my grace is sufficient (2 Corinthians 12:9).” Sometimes grace is a friend, ordained by God to come along side when we need to hear His truth in another voice and feel His embrace. Holy Spirit words burst from Elizabeth’s mouth at the sound of Mary’s voice. Mary needn’t figure out how to explain, what trembling sentence to use to describe an angelic encounter and a spiritual conception. Before she could say the first word, God erased every anxiety with Elizabeth’s embrace, Elizabeth’s voice. The magnificat follows, born of grace.
Riley went to a sleepover last weekend, and this week, she received three candy cane grams at school from three little girls who are truly her friends. I think my heart could burst. I have prayed so long for friends for Riley. Her whole life is a sculpture of the Spirit, a magnificat. Again and again, God shows His glory by accomplishing the impossible in my little girl’s life. And He has not failed to shower her with grace for all the challenges she faces yet. And sometimes grace is a friend—three—who love you as you are and tell you the truth, Spirit words falling from their lips: You are loved. These little girls wait on the lawn for Riley when they all get together. They don’t seem to mind that her sense of humor is eccentric, her conversations difficult, her attention easily distracted. “Mom, you’re going to love Riley,” one of these little girls told her mom (who would soon after be Riley’s fifth grade teacher), “she’s great. She’s so nice.”
So much grace. And sometimes grace is a friend, an Elizabeth, to speak Spirit words into all our anxiety. Someone who understands. Someone who believes in all that God says He will accomplish in us.
At some point, if you are one of those friends or relatives whose love decorates our mail at Christmas, you have probably been my Elizabeth, your friendship all grace when I needed it most. I think of you, and I give thanks. You are a gift.
