Long weekend, but not in the nice, day-off-work-on-Monday kind of way. Not that this weekend wasn’t nice, but it was pretty packed. The brothers in the BroHo (myself included) went up to Berkeley for the USC-Cal Game. It was a really good, full trip. We left Friday morning and made it in time for the home meetings in Berkeley, caught breakfast with the Berkeley brothers next morning, watched USC beat Cal 62-28, then grabbed some pizza with the brothers on our way down. We made it back by midnight on Saturday.
I was reminded of two things: there is nothing like blending to open you up and there is nothing like a solid 30 straight hours with college brothers to expose how short you still are.
Coming back and reflecting on different things the Lord shined on during the trip, I was reminded of some fellowship brother Tom Goetz gave us in our fourth term. I felt like it would be good to go come back to it and share it with whoever reads this (mainly me in however many years).
We have a funny idea of what it means to enjoy the Lord. To enjoy the Lord does not mean that we are “happy” all the time. The enjoyment of Christ isn’t superficial, it is not that you are going to be happy, having fun, but sometimes in your deepest sorrow or in your greatest loss you will enjoy something and then you will understand. It is okay.
Sometimes when the saints are suffering things, they will say “I thought the Lord said that the grace would be sufficient”. Maybe you have complained that. If you are going to ask Paul what grace felt like, he would say “the only thing that I am conscious of is the thorn, but I am still here. Strangely, I am still here. I don’t know what grace feels like, but I am still here. Somehow I am okay.
I am not going through a major suffering, but I think we all have many little thorns throughout the day. They keep pricking us, they won’t go away. Or, for some of us it may be one little thorn throughout many many days. It is helpful to realize and acknowledge how much grace we are actually enjoying, probably without even realizing it.
Brother Lee in “the Genuine Ground of Oneness” speaks similarly.
Although many have experienced grace, we still do not know grace… All married brothers and sisters [as well as the single ones] must learn to go to the Lord and pray, “Lord, I need you. I cannot bear this situation any longer.” Simply by opening to the Lord in this way, grace is dispensed into us. Through such a supply of grace, you are able to go on.
It’s not something seemingly so miraculous. We are just able to go on. I’ve prayed those prayers many times hoping for some “second wind” of life or energy to reinvigorate me, yet those rarely ever came. This may have been Paul’s experience in 1 Corinthians 15:10. He says “His grace unto me did not turn out to be in vain”. I may be using some artistic license here, but to Paul it may not have been so obvious at first. Perhaps, he questioned whether or not anything was happening, whether the Lord’s grace was actually sufficient. Eventually, He realized that it was. The grace of God turned out not to be in vain. Then he could say, all these times, “I still made it, I’m still here. I’m still going on. Yet not I, but the grace of God which is with me”.
God's Heart is Set on Zion 
Hi Manny! My sister told me about your blog. Hope that’s OK. This was the first post I read, and it has really encouraged me and been supplying me these past few months. It’s so true that a lot of times we think that to “enjoy” grace (or to enjoy anything) means that somehow it can make us feel happy and fun and take away all the bad or unhappy feelings. In experience though, that is not a real indicator of whether or not you are enjoying grace. I guess it is like you and br Tom say, that when we open to the Lord and cry out to Him in our sufferings, we find that somehow we are still here and still going on! We are continuing to be in the situation that we thought was impossible to be in, and do the thing we thought was impossible to do. (That is from a quote I read in the training, but I forgot from where.) And it’s grace that is able to do that. We don’t need to go looking for a happy feeling or to wait for the painful feelings to go away, to know that we’re still enjoying grace. That is really supplying!
Anyway, I hope you continue to write. It’s very encouraging to your readers! Also as a random side note, I just found out today that br Kerri has a blog! Don’t know if you know that already, but it has some neat posts. Here’s a link: notes.robichaux.name/ I hope that your semester continues and wraps up fully IN Christ and in the enjoyment of grace!
Hey Jennifer!
Thanks so much for that comment. That really does encourage me to write more! And that blog from brother Kerry is awwwesome…
“I do not think that anyone can deliberately plan out an education that will assuredly result in a place in the Lord’s service. We know that this is not how the Lord operates. He leads us, if we let Him, but rarely does He let us know more about the path ahead than what our short sight can actually see. I believe that we human beings are very poor predictors of our own futures, and He does not expect us or even allow us to know where we will be in His service in the future.”
So good! Hope everything is going well with you all over there in Israel too. I’m sure there is much sneaky grace to be experienced in medical school in a foreign country with a newborn.
-manny
Yes that is an awesome quote, and an amazing piece of fellowship! So great for young students and those of us looking for the next steps in how to go on to hear such a word! I am definitely bookmarking that quote for future reference… Heh, I do hope that there is much sneaky grace every day, for taking care of the baby and for navigating the craziness that is Israelis :P. I think we are doing well, but really only when we’re enjoying the Lord and not focusing on ourselves!