Grace: \ˈgrās\

unmerited divine assistance given humans for their regeneration or sanctification

I'm sitting on the cement square on the top the hill. My back is against the fiber glass rock that covers camp's well. As I sit I look down at, "The Oven".

"The Oven", by any other name is "Field Two" and it sits largely by itself, baking in the sun until 3:30 in the afternoon, when SNAG (Starting New at Golf) comes in.

Eight students and two instructors stand at the edge of the field, in the sun, and hit brightly colored, miniature, tennis balls at longs strips of tri folded velcro (the 'holes').

The moisture in the air starts to pool in the my bend of my elbow and along the back of my knee. Even though I've barely moved for twenty minutes, the sun is pulling sweat out of me like a magnet till it is running down my head and gathering around my nose.

Gross.

Then...grace comes.

A vacuum of air opens in the atmosphere around me and the particles of air rush to fill it.

A breeze.

Suddenly the sweat on my skin is helping me feel cooler. Making the breeze count for more than if it had been dry.

I want to take moments like this as reminders of grace, of the fall.

We fell away from God in the Garden. We fell away from His will and took the consequences of that. Pain, sweat, toil...sweat. But in the Garden God also saved our shame, and clothed us. One of the first acts of Grace.

Now we sweat and toil through and afternoon of golf in "the oven", and through colds, and long walks, and high temperatures, and bruised and scratched limbs, and difficult campers, and heartbreaking situations, and then, a breeze comes. Nothing but a vacuum of air being filled.

God created vacuums of air and it is Grace. We fell, we take the consequences, and God gives Grace.

The grace of a beautiful breeze.

^"Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will—  to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves. In him we have redemptionthrough his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God’s grace that he lavished on us. With all wisdom and understanding..."  -Ephesians 1:3-8

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