Does an abundant life, a life lived to the full, have room for struggle, for sickness, and for sin? Can a life full of hardships, heartbreaks, and hurt still be considered an abundant life?
Yes. The way of grace accounts for this. Where there is hurt and heartbreak, grace abounds and gives space to experience peace in confounding ways.
We are given grace upon grace. So make sure you give yourself space to receive it. It is a gift. And once you have accepted that grace for yourself, be ok with the peace it can provide. You don’t need to beat yourself up.
When you give yourself grace also give it to others. Do that and you’ll find that it will be given back to you in full, pressed-down, shaken together to make room for more, running over, and poured all over your life, plopped down right in your lap.
The hard circumstances of your life are not eliminated; they are not removed. It seems that’s not usually how things operate in this world. But grace is sufficient. And the harder our life, the more abundant the grace. And in our lowest of lows and in our weakest moments, grace empowers us to accept insults, hardships, persecutions, difficulties. It’s how we can say that we have an abundant life, how we can say we are living life to the full, even when that fullness includes the hardest realities.
When we are weak, we are strong. Oh how the upside-down truths of life feel like inside jokes sometimes. But if you know, you know.
“And I’ve got no answers for hurt knees or cancers,
But a Savior who suffers them with me.”
-John Mark McMillan, from his song “The Road, the Rocks, and the Weeds.”
Stepping Back 