Just read Brennan Manning's "All is Grace"

I just finished reading Brennan Manning's Autobiography, "All is Grace". It's been hard to put down the past few days. I feel a movement in my heart that I've felt before in my life, mostly in the dark times of addiction or loneliness. Reading his honest, simple, and kind account of his own life fans again the little ember of desire in me to be honest, simple and kind. 

Someone said that close relationships don't make you impatient or immature they only expose the fact that you are impatient and immature. That's hard for me to face since I want to blame everyone else for my lackings. Sara Groves is a songwriter who encourages me with her honesty: 

"I'm tired of blaming everybody, I'm sorry if I blamed you." from Right Now, Invisible Empires

Brennan's life has been full of pain, great heights and great depths. The people who've moved my heart most toward Jesus have been the ones who have been most in touch with their need for Jesus themselves and most honest about it. There's a kind of hospitality in that honesty. A love that makes room. That love exposes the lack of that love in me. 

I tend more often to have a need to feel like I am good more than to help other people know that they are loved (even though they are not good). "All is Grace" reminds me that I must see that I'm not good, yet I am loved by Jesus. If I can get that through my head then maybe I can be more hospitable to folks like Jesus has been to me. Otherwise I'll end up putting on them the same demand for 'good performance' that I put on myself because it's hard for me to believe that I'm a legitimate child of God, that Jesus has qualified me by his mercy and grace on the cross. 

But He has! Such a mercy to be rescued from our inadequacies by Jesus' graceful love. Brennan Manning's has been a continuous journey of battling to remember that Grace and in so doing to help others believe it.