Wild Grace

Last week, my grandfather passed away. Just months prior, my dad sent me this video of his baptism. When I first saw the video, I wanted to dance and sing! My grandfather's decision to get baptized came as a surprise to many in our family—quite frankly, no one expected him to make this decision on his own initiative. Stubborn and resistant to the idea of God for much of his life, his timely declaration to follow Jesus was God’s gracious answer to decades of prayer, particularly from my grandmother. 

The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit. (John 3:8)

The events of the past few months remind me that God’s Spirit and His grace are like the wind. Unrestrained and not tame, limitless and not boxed in. Free to move as it pleases. Wild. I used to think that there were right or wrong type of people to meet God, but now I know: anyone, at any moment, can be forever changed by God’s indelible grace. I can never really predict where or when the wind will blow, so I must expect surprises.

Recently, I have been reflecting on the free nature of God in the book of Job. What do we do with a God who defies all our expectations? Ultimately, why do we worship God? Do we worship because He is the God we expect or demand Him to be, or because He is God—completely sovereign and free? The idea of an utterly free God normally produces one of two responses: joy or frustration. Joy from the recipients of such wild grace, and frustration usually from the observing bystanders (think Jonah, the elder son, and those hired early to work in the vineyard). I think the difference between the two responses is a deep understanding that God’s grace belongs entirely to Him, and thus, He generously dispenses as He wishes. In the words of the vineyard master: "Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me?" Is grace “fair” always? It wasn’t fair for me, and it’s not fair for anyone. The God who so graciously encountered me when I did not expect it, is freely doing the same for others around me. And rightfully so.

And were my head lifted up, you would hunt me like a lion and again work wonders against me. (Job 10:16) 

Though directed as a complaint against God, Job evokes a beautiful metaphor: God as a wild lion hunting his prey. Grace is God drawing man ever closer to Himself. The tendency is to make faith into an adventure of man seeking and discovering God. But the narrative of the Bible puts God at the center: in His wild grace, He searches out and finds His people. Vincent Donovan, a missionary to the Masai people in East Africa during the 1960s, recalls a conversation about faith and God between him and a Masai elder. The elder describes God as a wild lion, an analogy that has stuck closely with me the past few months:

He said for a man really to believe is like a lion going after its prey. His nose and eyes and ears pick up the prey. His legs give him the speed to catch it. All the power of his body is involved in the terrible death leap and single blow to the neck with the front paw, the blow that actually kills. And as the animal goes down the lion envelops it in his arms (Africans refer to the front legs of an animal as its arms), pulls it to himself, and makes it part of himself. This is the way a lion kills. This is the way a man believes. This is what faith is. 

I looked at the elder in silence and amazement … But my wise old teacher was not finished yet.  "We did not search you out, Padri," he said to me. "We did not even want you to come to us. You searched us out. You followed us away from your house into the bush, into the plains, into the steppes where our cattle are, into the hills where we take our cattle for water, into our villages, into our homes. You told us of the High God, how we must search for him, even leave our land and our people to find him. But we have not done this. We have not left our land. We have not searched for [God]. [God] has searched for us. [God] has searched us out and found us. All the time we think we are the lion. In the end, the lion is God.