The palette of grace

I love stories.  Life is story.  God’s Word is the story of stories, the most majestic tale of love, loss, tragedy and victory that ever was told.  And in God’s Word, He pulls no punches. He tells it like it is.  And I love that.  I love truth, love to see God’s super natural power intersecting our daily lives.  And, well, I just love to tell stories.

This probably annoys some people, but I tend to think that everything is a fun story.  So, I will tell about an odd encounter at the grocery store as if it were headline news.  My dad is the same way.  He can turn the stupidest event into a story and somehow make people listen. And, interestingly enough, I can already see this in my son.  Everything is a larger-than-life adventure to him.

So while there’s nothing wrong with telling stories, I’ve been thinking lately about the weighty significance of how we tell them. For example, a few things recently have made me realize, Wow–there are definitely two sides to every story!  So let’s say we have an event.  There are two people involved, person A and person B.  Person A sees it from her perspective, person B sees it from his perspective. They disagree.  Then, here’s the scary part. Person A tells the story to another person, person C–and she emphasizes that part that she wants to emphasize. It’s still the truth, but it’s dramatized from her perspective.  So now it’s interpreted by person C as a major mistreatment of person A.  Now person B tells the story to another person, person D from his perspective, but heightened emphasizing the part that he wants to emphasize. Now person D interprets based on this heightened story, and it seems a major mistreatment of person B.

What began as a slight difference of opinion has just become a gross injustice.

What’s scary is that this happens all the time.  Every single time we say something, we paint a picture.  We paint pictures of each other, of circumstances, of events, of stories.  We go around, all day long, every day, painting pictures.  We use our words to paint: We paint those we don’t care for as villains, we paint ourselves as saints, we paint our spouses as one or the other based on what day it is  .

And what this all boils down to is humility.

We paint the way we do because of either pride or humility.

Humility chooses to paint others with gentle strokes, a palette of grace, highlighting beauty and diminishing blemishes.

We wouldn’t dare post a horribly unflattering picture of someone on facebook (at least I hope you wouldn’t!) but might we consider painting an unflattering picture of them with our choice of words?

We reveal our pride or our humility by the way we describe those who believe differently than we do.  “They have whacked-out views” reveals pride.  “They believe a little differently than we do in this area” reveals humility.

God’s Word says that “Love covers over a multitude of sins” (1 Peter 4:8).  When we paint with love, we paint in a way that is true, right, accurate, but tinted by the beautiful color of love.  We dip our brush into the dye of grace and choose to add an extra hue of forbearance, of humility, of charity.  Whether we’re painting our spouse, our best friend, the church across town, or the person who wronged us, we choose to paint with love.

We choose to immortalize a picture of them that they would thank us for.

It sounds funny but when I was praying to God about how this works, about how to describe things and situations fairly, it was impressed on my heart, “Paint them the way their mother would.”  Wow. That settles it.  No one has eyes of love for my kids more than me.

Do you know that this is what Christ has done for us?  He has painted us for the Father.  His sacrifice has once and for all painted us with the gracious strokes of forgiveness.  His blood painted our picture–creating a masterpiece as perfect as Christ Himself.

He chose to die that we might be painted in a perfect way.  This is love.

Lord increase our love. Teach us by your spirit.  Lead us in humility.  Help us in the way we paint.

Revisiting these thoughts from the archives…

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{What stories will you paint today and what shades of humility will you use? I pray you choose the palette of of grace, today. Thanks for reading.}