A fresh dose of grace

Sometimes a body has a rotten day. Or a string of them, til you find yourself walking around, blowing out deep breaths. And sighing a lot. And you come full-face with what flimsy stuff you're made of.

Eventually the sun goes down, and you're glad it's time to climb in the bed and pull the covers up over your head.

Thoughts of grace twirl and loop and curtsy your  brain to sleep. How much grace a body needs, how begrudgingly little you extend, and you drift off, aware it's amazing God even bothers with you most days.

Then.

Then you wake up, and make your way to the coffee pot, pour a generous dose of artery clogging creamer, and take a few long sips. Oh, the smell of coffee, the feel of a cup between your hands. And you sit there on your sofa, staring out the window at nothing really, but the familiar is comfort.

You walk through the neighborhood, letting the dog sniff every single blade of grass and already doused mail post, because the luxury of time and more time this morning is a fresh dose of grace.

At some point in the day, instead of washing floors and toilets, you sit and knit, wondering why on earth anyone knits socks, when they can be bought at the local store for $2 a pair. From somewhere inside you comes the answer - knitting a sock is a fresh dose of grace. Slaying thinking too hard about anything else except knit and purl and knit and purl, stripe after stripe as the sock begins to appear and maybe something in the world makes sense after all, even if it's just a sock.

Then you grab someone you love, someone in all ways familiar, and drive to the local drive-in for a root beer float. Hotdogs, unplanned, are $1.49 each. You sit and munch on that hot dog and slurp that root beer float, all the while watching young girls skate to and fro, and all your thought is taken up to wondering how they keep from falling down. And that is yet another fresh dose of grace.

At the supermarket, in the lotion aisle, the clerk has a quota and you're a number, and everything in you wants to snap and walk away. You listen, choose, thank, and walk away. Grace going the other direction as it should.

Home to a glass of wine in the hot tub, talking through the events of the day, thoughts pushed aside til now, problems, solutions, another fresh dose of grace.

Steaks on the grill, salad and potato, recorded TV, knitting at that same sofa you started the day at. Now it's done and ready to be packed away. The cover closed on yet another. And it wasn't such a bad day after all. Not so many big breaths this day. Fewer sighs.

More grace than a body deserves.  Undeserved merit flowing back and forth through a day, through a life. Off to bed, covers pulled up to your chin, thankful for a the gift of sleep and fresh starts every single day.