One For The Road

We have all heard this phrase 'one for the road', and to most it means to take one more drink before exiting one's favorite watering hole.

But I want to share with you a glimpse into someone's life that shines so clearly the reality of what a 'hard-knock life' can look like and still shine the love and grace of God so clearly it is almost blinding.  Maybe the light shines so bright because the soul that bears it is so beat up and burdened.

This is an extended exerpt from Brennan Manning's book entitled All is Grace:

"I have written about experiences with the straight-no-chaser grace of God, battered by wave upon wave of His tender fury.  I have also experieced just as many, if not more, moments where Abba's love was mediated, grace via the cloud of witnesses who have cast shadows on my bedraggled, beat-up, and burnt-out life.  I have tried to honor those lives in this book.  But either way all is well, grace is grace. The book's subtitle has a qualifier--A Ragamuffin Memoir.  It's best you know that going in.  I fear that word has lost some of its original grit.  Ragamuffins have a singular prayer: 'God, be merciful to me, a sinner.'  Any additonal flourishes to make that cry more palatable are pharisaical leaven.  Warning: Mine has been anything but a straight shot, more like a crooked path filled with thorns and crows and vodka.  Prone to wander?  You bet.  I've been a priest, then an ex-priest.  Husband, then ex-husband.  Amazed crowds one night and lied to friends the next.  Drunk for years, sober for a season, then drunk again.  I've been John the beloved, Peter the coward, and Thomas the doubter all before the waitress brought the check.  I've shattered every one of the Ten Commandments six times Tuesday.  And if you believe that last sentence was for dramatic effect, it wasn't."  Manning reflects a little about the weight of his words then adds this concluding thought: "I am living in a different emotional direction.  I am steering toward home, hardly a poster child for anything. . .anything, that is, but grace. . .Grace is everything."

Brennan Manning had many "one's for the road" and his life was a portrait of despair, brokenness, frustration and loss because of it.  But what he discovered was that Jesus' love for him was so intense, so undeterred, that He overcame Manning's challenges.  Not that the addictions were ever conquered, but that his heart finally was.

It is all grace.

And here is your 'one for the road' today:  know that God's love for you is far stronger, richer and enduring than any of your addictions, self-abuse or pain.  Just like Manning was able to say this for himself, let it be true for you as well "God is very fond of me."

It's true.

BT