Grace gets around.

There’s a lot of talk about grace out there this morning. The universe in its infinite playfulness has thrown together some seeming happenstance that caught my attention just now. In a newsletter a woman talks about grace. As in “Grace of God”. In a meeting the other day Robin’s words came back to me, “Grace is the undeserved mercy and favor…..” and I can’t recall the rest right now. He meant “of God”. I struggled with this for years. It dawned on me one day that grace was all around. That what I needed to do was turn my cheek to the light and just allow myself to bathe in its warmth. That grace was not something earned or deserved but simply there for me / us at all times. So I am the spy who comes in from the cold. It’s cold “out there”. Come and turn your face to the light Jami.

So does this mean that some act of courage precedes the embrace of grace? That I must take a step towards grace? If I look around I can see that certainly there is no logic to my twenty five years of sobriety. Yes, I took a step out of the cold night of despair. So did / do many others. Why was I so hungry for sanity? I was driven to uncover and discover the depth of my discomfort. What happened? When? Why? Where? How did I escape?

When I was fifteen I was abducted by five boys that had stolen the car of one of their parents. They had been cruising the streets of Hyde Park looking for a girl to kidnap and rape. I was just a girl coming home from a concert. I wasn’t supposed to be out. I had asked if I could go. My mother had an important meeting. I went out anyway. In a moment everything changed.

I have had a lifetime of struggle. It’s clear now that it didn’t start that night. That night was something else all together. How did I escape? I remember convincing them not to kill me…I remember promising not to tell…over and over. I was blindfolded. I was far away from home. I was injured. When I finally got home the police were already there.

Reading about the most recent kidnapping of a young girl that escaped really gave me pause. Wow I thought! She stayed alive. She escaped. I escaped. Courage combined with grace. That’ s what it seems like from here. Almost fifty years from that moment in time I am humbled to my knees and surrounded by light and yes grace.