Since my Kairos weekend in prison I have been thinking a lot about grace and forgiveness. Go figure! So today I listened again to Slaid Cleaves’ One Good Year for the first time in a while, and heard it as what it clearly [duh!] is – a song about grace, forgiveness, and second chances.
“Just give me one good year. To get my feet back on the ground. I’ve been chasing grace, but grace ain’t so easily found.”
But mostly, the song made me think of the guy sitting next to me at the table that weekend in prison who, at age fifteen, was given a life sentence for killing someone. Having done fifteen years already, he had spent as much of his life in prison as not. Mostly, I thought of him after Cleaves got to this line:
“When you start giving in, where do the promises all go? Will your darkest hour write a blank check on your soul?”
It is easy to let these “darkest hours” control, easy to stumble over something in the past, something behind. The question becomes this: When I make a mistake will I let that define me, define my future?
Through grace and forgiveness, of course, this need not happen. But as Cleaves notes, “grace ain’t so easily found,” and even if “easily found,” is not always recognized and accepted. Clearly, my new friend next to me at the table was working on the grace he had found. He had acknowledged his sin and was trying to do something about it. He was part of the Kairos weekend. Recently, at her request, he had met with a daughter of his victim and expressed an apology to her as best he could, and she had forgiven him as best as she could. He was, as Cleaves puts it, “chasing grace.”
On reflection, it occurs to me that Cleaves had come up with a pretty good working definition (or at least explanation) of “grace” and “forgiveness.” Through grace and forgiveness, God gives us all a chance to keep our dark hours from writing blank checks on our souls. He paid that debt for us long ago.
It occurs to me... 