{"id":2457,"date":"2012-06-06T07:21:21","date_gmt":"2012-06-06T14:21:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tgdarkly.com\/blog\/?p=2457"},"modified":"2012-06-06T07:21:21","modified_gmt":"2012-06-06T14:21:21","slug":"change-and-grace","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/2012\/06\/06\/change-and-grace\/","title":{"rendered":"Change and Grace"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I heard a story recently about a woman who had grown up Catholic in another country. \u00a0As the story is told, it was one of those<\/em> Catholic upbringings — lots of guilt and obligation and rigid authority. \u00a0She came to America as a child, and throughout her life here she searched for God, until, finally, she was “saved” in an independent evangelical church, at which she tearfully told her story. \u00a0In this experience and in this community, she found the Grace that had eluded her all her life.<\/p>\n

I heard another story about a man who was raised in an independent evangelical church. \u00a0It was one of those<\/em> independent evangelical upbringings — lots of noise and action floating lightly above an undercurrent of reactionary anger and denial. \u00a0He became a famous writer, he wrote Important Books that would reform his church. \u00a0He realized that all along he had been searching for God, and in the middle of his life, he converted to Catholicism. \u00a0In the quiet presence of the Eucharist, in the long, slow history of the Tradition, in the nuance of the great Catholic minds, he found the Grace that had eluded him all his life.<\/p>\n

I’ve heard this story many times: \u00a0Charismatics becoming Episcopalians; Episcopalians becoming Eastern Orthodox; Eastern Orthodox becoming Pentecostals; Pentecostals becoming Quakers; Arminians becoming Calvinists; Calvinists becoming Arminians;\u00a0Catholics becoming Evangelicals; Fundamentalists becoming Liberals; Liberals becoming Fundamentalists; Evangelicals becoming Anglicans becoming Catholics becoming Eastern Orthodox becoming Evangelicals again; all of them searching for God, finding, perhaps, some measure of Grace along the way.<\/p>\n

Maybe Grace only appears when change becomes necessary. \u00a0Or, maybe Grace is always there, and we don’t see it until the weight of our inherited and accumulated self-righteousness provokes a crisis of change. \u00a0Maybe the final surrender to the inevitability of change releases our souls to receive Grace. \u00a0Maybe it’s more about the change than the substance.<\/p>\n

Yet the Word is full of grace and <\/em>truth (John 1:14). \u00a0So, maybe the change moves us towards<\/em> the Substance. \u00a0Maybe change itself is Grace. \u00a0Maybe God draws each person to Himself on pathways known only to Himself for reasons known only to Himself. \u00a0The Orthodox and the Catholics and the Anglicans may be right about the Apostolic Succession. \u00a0The Orthodox may be right about the Great Schism of 1054, or the Catholics may be right. \u00a0The Baptists instead may be right about local\u00a0independence, or the Presbyterians may be right about oversight (and Calvin) or the Methodists may be right about it all (including Calvin) or the Anabaptists and Quakers and New Monastics might live more faithfully, or the leftist Episcopalians or the rightist evangelical Anglicans or the obtuse Anglo-Catholics. We each have to trust, I suppose, that God is giving us the Truth we’re prepared to handle, and that Grace is pulling us along.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I heard a story recently about a woman who had grown up Catholic in another country. \u00a0As the story is told, it was one of those Catholic upbringings — lots of guilt and obligation and rigid authority. \u00a0She came to America as a child, and throughout her life here she searched for God, until, finally, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[73,74],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2457","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-church","category-spirit"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p824rZ-DD","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2457","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2457"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2457\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}