Ragamuffins

Have you ever been in one of those precarious situations where all of a sudden, your weaknesses become blatantly obvious to you?  For me, these moments seem to happen all too often.  Recently I have had a lot on my mind, and on top of that class workloads have increased, and I have just become stressed.  If you know me, you know that I do not deal well with stress at all.  Once something is on my mind it is stuck there and it begins to be all I can think about.  And when I am thinking about like a million things I get stuck in my head.  One of the best outlets I have found to deal with my stress is exercise.  Biking, running, swimming, the elliptical, anything; when I am exercising all that is heavy on my heart just melts away.  It is if I am running from my problems and into the arms of Jesus.  And that is what I desperately want to do, run into the loving arms of my Savior and let Him love me.  I have found that so often, I find that I seek God and try to “find” Him when all I have to do is turn around and realize He is waiting for me with open arms.  He meets me where I am, wherever that may be.

I just started reading The Ragamuffin Gospel by Brennan Manning and it is about the grace of God and all the things that often stand in the way of us accepting the gift of God’s grace.  God is seriously using this book to make me look at my own life and what makes accepting God’s love for me so hard at times.  Somewhere along the way, I have misconstrued what it means to be loved by God.  Somehow I have twisted it into a matter of my performance, and I have a desire to please God through my life.  And while that is a lovely goal, it can be disheartening because I am not perfect, and I will always come up short.  Instead of placing so much focus on trying to please God, I have to learn to trust in who God says I am which is extremely hard for me at times.  In the chapter titled “Tilted Halos” there is a quote that I think is beautiful.  “Getting honest with ourselves does not make us unacceptable to God.  It does not distance us from God, but draws us to Him –as nothing else can – and opens us anew to the flow of grace.  While Jesus calls each of us to a more perfect life, we cannot achieve it on our own.  To be alive is to be broken; to be broken is to stand in need of grace.  It is only through grace that any of us could dare hope that we could become more like Christ.”  That is where I am, drawing near to God so I can more fully experience the depths and fullness of His love and grace.