gracefully given.

Grace.

Grace.

Some days, I go to sleep more or less the same as I woke up. Others, like today, I am changed by the moments in between.

Almost from the beginning, I have held to one thing about the people around me: they are filled with grace. I might not agree with their politics, or the particulars of their beliefs, or the way they always sort of spit out the word "feminism," as though it has four letters.

But they are filled with grace. And in their presence, my heart longs for it.

People tell me that they're just trying to convert me. That they're only nice because they want me to believe exactly as they do. Friends from home have insisted that underneath the veneer is hatefulness, unhappiness. Actually, people from here, friends from the university, say the same.

I don't think that's true.

That's what I told my professor today, as she told me that she thinks it's impossible for those with literalist beliefs to have a well-integrated faith, or to experience true psychological well-being, or self-actualization. I don't agree. What I see doesn't support such an assertion. Her response: the christian conservatives only appear to be happy.

All evidence to the contrary.

I spent the afternoon in a home so filled with love, and happiness, and grace, I wish that I could bring her there. Not because I think she'd leave in sudden agreement with me. But because love changes things. If you're open to it. Because the power of grace, of a people who will love me when I am entirely ungraceful, is life-altering.

They don't always, or even often, agree with me. They will not pretend to stand for things they are in fact against. But they love through.

Sometimes, we don't see change in ourselves until weeks, or months, or years after. We wake up one morning, and something throws us back, and we remember, "So that's who I was." Other times, we savor the moment of change. We know immediately the difference.

I stood in the kitchen of an incredible woman, with incredible women, and as we prayed together, I knew that this was an important moment. Though it wasn't overwhelmingly emotional, and was perhaps uncomfortable in part, I felt God telling me to remember, to pay attention. And I did, as though suspending the prayers, suddenly crystalline in mid-air, floating through all of the years of my life, whatever those might hold--ongoing reminders of how God's love accounts for the impossible.

These people I've taken up with, these Christians--they love because they were first Loved. They give grace freely not from their own stores, but from His. So lives are changed.