embraced by Grace

It wasn’t intentional, and nothing tumultuous or tragic happened; it just took a couple of weeks and a little bit of moving. A necklace, a ring, and an earring: 3 separate pieces now combined into a tangled mess. Before I knew it I had one of the biggest knots I’d seen. The chain of the necklace had wrapped around itself, and the other two pieces of jewelry. That has happened before, but it was never that tangled. There were more tiny knots than I could even see to count.
It took a lot of patience to untangle it. A few times I even thought about ripping it just to get it undone. But since I really like the chain on that necklace, I decided against it. I just kept working at it and working at it and eventually it was freed....well almost. There is still a tiny little knot that I can’t get out, but it’s definitely wear-able again.
God was teaching me a lesson as I sat and untangled that knot. It’s quite comparable to our lives sometimes. We don’t intentionally tangle things up, nothing terribly tragic has happened; we try to play it safe but we just aren’t that intentional with keeping things in order. We shift something around here or there, but don’t think much of it. We see a little knot start to form, but it’s happened before and we’ve successfully untangled it...so we can do it again. And then one day, we look at a couple things in our life and realize we have a huge tangled knot. Try to fix it as we may, we can’t get it undone.
Our God is patient. And He knows how to untangle. He sees the miniscule details of how the knot formed and His fingers are precise to undo what we can’t. Just as I was careless about the jewelry, sometimes I can be that way with life. It has to continually come back to a place of engaging in my relationship with Jesus. To take care of that stuff while it’s still small - no, rather to let Jesus take care of it. Absolutely nothing is beyond God’s capacity to figure out; He can do and undo what we can’t. His love and faithfulness are constant and fresh. And I want to live in that; not just letting Him untangle things when it gets to the point that I can’t. I wanna be vulnerable with God, letting Him deal with my fears and insecurities as they come up, so that it doesn’t turn into a big knot. I know there will be times that it does, and when it happens, God’s got me. But I’d rather rest in His presence, staying engaged with Jesus, being intentional and not lazy... Resting in Jesus.
I still have that little knot it my necklace. And for now, I’m going to leave it as a reminder. It’s interesting...this necklace I’m talking about has two inscriptions. One one side it says hagios which is the Greek word for holy, and on the other it says charis which is the Greek word for grace....all kinds of reminders in this one!