“Grace on your face?”
My friend paid and just as the young man put the last sack of groceries in her cart he looked up and said to her quietly, “You have grace on your face.” A little startled, her mind being on getting to her car and on with her day, she looked back at him and simply said, not knowing what he meant by his comment, “Thank you.”
My friend paid and just as the young man put the last sack of groceries in her cart he looked up and said to her quietly, “You have grace on your face.” A little startled, her mind being on getting to her car and on with her day, she looked back at him and simply said, not knowing what he meant by his comment, “Thank you.”
On subsequent days at the same store, in the same check out line, my friend saw the young man again. As she got to know him she found out that he was a believer in Christ, a Christian who loved God and attended a church she knew about. That explained his comment to her that first day.
God uses people to reflect Himself on earth through their stories. Paul says Christians are “letters written by the Spirit of God (II Cor 3:2-3)…the fragrance of Christ (II Cor 2: 15). The young grocery man noticed something in my friend she was unaware of that day. Had he never said anything to her she would never have known the impact of her presence.
How many times does this happen and we never know that we represent the presence of Christ in our sphere of influence? We aren’t even aware. In some ways, it’s a scary thought.
All of us are a part of the bigger story; each of us lives in a time-bound geographical and historical period; and each of us lives only a relatively short period of time. Believers have the distinct honor of being His visible presence in their sphere of influence for the period of time they are living on earth.
Phillip Yancey in his book, The Jesus I Never Knew comments, “We would in fact know nothing about him except for the traces he left in human beings. That was his design. The law and the prophets had focused like a beam of light on the One who was to come and now that light, as if hitting a prism, would fracture and shoot out in a human spectrum of waves and colors.”
Many different sightings of His presence are possible as Eugene Peterson offers in Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places. We, as the human spectrum, are living, walking stories for the Gospel. This makes me want to be aware, hold my head a little higher and pay attention. Do I have "grace on my face"? How about you?
Gail Seidel
Gail Seidel served as Mentor Advisor for Spiritual Formation in the Department of Spiritual Formation and Leadership at Dallas Theological Seminary (DTS) and as an Adjunct Professor in the D Min in Spiritual Formation in the D Min Department at Dallas Theological Seminary. She has a BA in English from the University of Texas, a Masters in Christian Education from Dallas Seminary and a D Min in Spiritual Formation from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. She is a contributor to the textbook, Foundations of Spiritual Formation, Kregel Academic. She served as co-director for Christian Women in Partnership Russia with Entrust, an international church leadership-training mission. She and her husband Andy live in Fredericksburg, Texas. They have 2 married children and 6 wonderful grandchildren--Kami, Kourtney, Katie, Mallory, Grayson, and Avery.
