New Eyes

On January 1st I wrote about a sort of resolution I had to see with new eyes this year. To focus on what I have and not what I don't have.
I used the quote from Marcel Proust: The only real voyage of discovery consists of not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

I have always been filled with gratitude for my life and I know Who to thank, but I am often just as observant of things that aren't just the way I'd like them. Well, I already screwed up - but am recently back on the right track. To me, this is grace.

Grace is a tricky concept and although we may have grown up singing about how amazing it is - I don't think it can be understood until it is truly experienced. Sometimes it seems like an answer to a prayer, but sometimes it is a gift that was not expected. It is more than you imagined. To feel as if you are seeing the world with new eyes is no small feat. It is an internal experience and no one can give it to you, except God.

Anne Lamott says: I do not understand the mystery of grace - only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.

Frank Stella writes in"A Faith Worth Believing":
Perhaps grace is not so graceful after all. Perhaps it's in our disgraced moments that the mystery of God's presence can impact us the most. When we glimpse Divinity in the dust or, better put, when we see the Divinity of dust and pain and all things and all people unattractive to us, then we've met grace face to face and can be led beyond our blindness to an acceptance of reality as it is, and of God, who is never apart from it.