All Things are Blessed in the Lord

All things are Blessed in the Lord. 

A man can sense this through Grace. But there is no other way to sense it, try though he may, under his own agency.

For the blessing of the Lord is a living thing, and not something that stands still and waits for us. It is always in movement, and it only moves into us to the extent that we move into it with open arms. If we try to stay where we are and wait for Grace to come to us, it will never find us. We must rather go out into the world, taking every chance, and risking everything, in the hopes that we will encounter it.

It falls into us like the shadows of fences on sidewalks; green leaves, and the sun on an old building. It is, in other words, what we already know, what we have always known — and yet it is also the unknown, because the parts of us that know it are the parts of ourselves that we don’t know.

And what part of ourselves is it, which we don't know? It’s the part that is God. We all have that part — because we cannot be separated from God in reality, although we live in our imagination, where we are always separate from God. We think that by imagining — by creating an image that we believe in — that we are with God, but God is beyond images, and only insofar as we are beyond images are we with God.

The Lord’s wish for goodness is inside every action, even if the action itself does not appear to have goodness in it. This is a mystery; and it is only manifest in accordance with the energy a man receives from Grace, whether or not he can understand this. For surely terrible things will happen; and only through Grace can any of it be understood.

The irony of it is that if Grace were in action in man, no terrible things would happen, except the terrible things that happen by themselves, of nature, and not in man. And even those would be tolerable under such circumstances. But most men know nothing of Grace and don't believe in Grace, in fact, Grace has never touched them directly. So one lacks trust; and without trust, how can Grace enter anything? It’s like expecting a man to be able to enter a woman, if the woman does not trust him. We are all women; and God can’t enter us if we do not trust God. Not because God is unable; God can do all things. He could enter us as He wished, if He were that way, if He used his Wrath or Force rather than His Mercy to be in relationship with us. But He will not do that; and so a man or woman must become the bride, waiting for the bridegroom.

Yet one doesn't want to wait for anyone, even God, because one is selfish and in a hurry.

So one rushes past God and all the good things God gives. And what good does that do one? One has worldly things, and all the things that belong to the earth, but one does not have God, and so everything that belongs to the earth is worthless. Found in God and through God, the earth is the greatest of treasures; without God, it is hell. And mankind has proved this over and over again throughout history, because he goes on creating hell over and over again.

Hell is a complicated place, and full of many problems. Heaven is unutterably simple, and it finds its rest in every ray of light. It's in the call of small birds, and the crispness of leaves on the ground; it is in worn stones and the sharp breath of tired dogs.

All of this is given to man, if he wants it. And these things could come in any moment, and do come in every moment; and they could be with us always—but not only in one way; in a thousand different ways that change as often as the moment changes. For such is Grace.

And we must open our hearts to feel it in every moment, for such is God, that He wants to be with us in every moment. And if we want to be with Him in any moment or every moment, He will allow it, but only as much as we allow it ourselves.

So one ought not look for Grace where one expects to find it, or expect Grace to find one as one expects it to be. It comes as a strange thing filled with Love, which one has never known before. It holds nothing back; one expects things to have a beginning and an end, but Grace has no beginning and has no end, and so it is nothing like one is, or what one expects.