A Little Grace

Have you ever done something and wished you had a life Tivo so you could rewind life and undo it? I have done many of those things, but today was a big one. I arrived home from a meeting at around 4 p.m. and was in deep thought. I pulled into the garage, shut the car off and without even thinking pushed the button to shut the garage. I gathered my things and was about to exit the car when I heard an awful scratching noise. My heart dropped as I watched the garage door switch directions and I heard the awful scratching noise again. "Oh dear God, please don't let this be happening!" I could only imagine the damage that the garage door had done to the truck, I was too afraid to even look. Finally, I gathered the courage and peeked around the back corner of the truck to see if the bumper was still attached. It was. However, in the middle of the tail gate, of my new black truck is a HUGE white scratch from the very top all the way to the bottom of the tailgate. I felt like I was going to vomit. My options were to go inside, tell my husband, and plead for my life;  hop in the truck, go to a friends house, call my husband, tell him and give him time to process the information before I was in his presence; or flat out lie about how the scratch was there when I got out of my meeting and it must have been some hoodlum kid. I chose to go with option #1. As I climbed the stairs, I contemplated crying because tears usually work in my favor, but I was too sick to deal with having to work up tears.  I arrived at the top of the stairs and thought, "maybe if I fake faint right now, he will be so worried about me that when I wake up and the first words out of my mouth are "I scratched the truck," he won't even care because, he'll be glad I'm alright." Before I could enact this plan, I heard myself saying, "I did a bad thing." I told him and he just stayed quiet. I asked him not to look at it because it would just make him upset, but he went down to check it out for himself anyways. He didn't say anything for about an hour and I just felt more and more horrible and thought about how much I would appreciate a little grace. Then, on the way to my parent's house for dinner, the much needed grace came. "It was mostly my fault you know. I was supposed to hang something from the ceiling in the garage so that you would know how far to pull in and I never got around to it," he said.   A flood of relief swept over me and I finally took a deep breath after holding my breath for about an hour. He didn't hate me and I was going to live after all! 

  Grace is a wonderful thing. It is something that God has been teaching me for the past year and today was one of the best lessons. I needed it so badly and it was soothing to my soul to receive it. I need to remember that feeling the next time I am in the position to show grace. I hope I am able to be as gracious as my husband was to me. And, I also pray that God shows us a lot of grace when we take the truck in to be fixed so that I won't have to sell one of my children in order to afford to pay for the repair.